A mother of two, model Christy Turlington Burns can relate running multiple marathons to childbirth.
“It’s like when you’re about to have a baby and you know it’s coming,” she said. “You know there’s only one way to get through it. It’s like your first childbirth; ‘I don’t know what my threshold is. I don’t know what my body can do.’ You go through the second one, you know what to look forward to. But it’s always different like a marathon.”
Turlington Burns, also a social activist, understands the labor that goes into both well.
On Sunday, she will be running the Chicago marathon for the first time. She ran the New York City marathon twice — once injured — and prepared to run it a third time only to have it canceled after Hurricane Sandy.
The marathon distance is tied to her charity, as she equates it to the distance some women in the world must walk to access health care during pregnancy and childbirth. She founded Every Mother Counts after experiencing a postpartum hemorrhage following her first delivery in 2003 and later filming a documentary about pregnant women’s access to health care.
“Distance is such a huge barrier for women to access care,” Turlington Burns said. “It’s one of those things in which we can make a huge difference. There’s no reason this should be happening anymore.”
Turlington Burns also is eager to beat her personal best of 4 hours, 20 minutes, 46 seconds she set in New York in 2011 in her first marathon. Last year, a hip injury slowed her to 4:35:32.
“That’s also kind of why I’m doing this,” she said. “I want to get to close to four (hours) as I possibly can.”
