Courtesy Photo Alpena native Michele Suszek trains in front of the picturesque backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. Suszek has taken her marathon running to the next level, hiring a coach and scheduling a number of marathons to compete in over the next few months.

By MICHAEL WIGMAN News Sports Writer Sometimes in life, when you find yourself facing adversity, you have to make an unorthodox decision to overcome it. After running, by her standards, a subpar 2:52.17 at the Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon in Nashville in late April, Alpena native Michele Suszek found herself facing such a life altering moment. “It was a shocker. It was devastating,” Suszek said. “I felt the best I had ever felt going into a race … It happens and everybody has a bad race and you can’t beat yourself up about it, but if you think there’s things that are wrong you should really look at those and try to fix them.” Sitting downtrodden on the flight from Nashville back to Denver, Suszek flipped through the May 2009 issue of Running Times and stumbled upon the life story of Lyle Knudson. “There was this couple page article on him in there about his kind of controversial or nontraditional American distance coaching ways,” Suszek sai.