Maureen McCool vaguely remembers a pop.

It was September, 2005, and she and then boyfriend Peter Broderick had just returned home from hiking Mount Coe in Baxter State Park. Working in the yard of her Farmington home, McCool began to feel ill. She couldn’t walk or speak above a very low whisper, and Broderick was in a shop on the other side of the yard.

“I had to crab walk across the yard,” McCool said. “I gave it all my might and it seemed like only a whisper to yell Peter’s name.”

Rushed to the hospital by Broderick and then an ambulance, then taken by LifeFlight to Portland, McCool was diagnosed as having a ruptured brain aneurysm. Her prognosis, if she survived the complications, would leave her with a 6.5 percent chance of living independently ever again.

Eight agonizing years later, McCool, 56, is in Minneapolis, running in the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday, and celebrating a remarkable and inspiring journey to get her life back to normal. 

The most overused word in sports these days is adversity. Listen to an athlete or coach talk and chances are they will find often find a way to work the word in, whether it’s to excuse poor play or ennoble success. It’s especially rife this time of year, when we have baseball teams talking about how they overcame so much to get to the playoffs, and we have football, where everything is embellished into a struggle of life and death.

McCool’s struggle is a reminder that adversity isn’t a stint on the disabled list or the loss of a nose tackle for the season.

One in 50 people have a brain aneurysm. Doctors believe McCool had a blood clot in her spine and prevented the cerebral fluid from travelling down her spine. She spent weeks in the hospital on and off a respirator (“There were times Peter thought that I was a goner,” she said), then doctors put a shunt in her head to open the cerebral fluid’s pathway again.

McCool’s memory of the six weeks before the shunt is spotty. She had water on the brain. Her condition improved in a rehab center, but frustration began to settle in as memories returned of her active lifestyle before her illness.

Once the co-chair of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club, McCool hiked anything 4,000 feet or more year-round prior to the brain aneurysm rupture. She traveled to the White Mountains and out west to hike, year-round, tackling Mount Washington in blinding snow storms.

McCool wanted to hike Mount Washington in the winter again, so she began walking with her Farmington friend, Tuffy Davis. Distorted vision made staying in a straight line and spotting obstacles difficult, so she walked behind Davis and watched the back of her feet, a habit she continued when they started running the trails of Flint Woods and Bonney Woods.

Running helped her balance, so much that, at the encouragement of another friend, Beth Allen, she ran in Freeport’s Jingle Bell Run in 2006.

McCool and Broderick were also married in 2006. A 2007 operation improved her vision. Following a Hal Higdon training schedule, she ran a half marathon in Bar Harbor in 2008. In 2009, she was able to climb Mt. Washington in the winter again.

“It’s been a long road,” she said. “It’s not the first year it happened. Each year, I’ve felt better and better.”

A Farmington resident since 1999 who works as a data developer in Massachusetts, McCool stumbled upon Medtronics’ Global Heroes program and applied to take part in its annual marathon. Medtronic told her she needed to run another marathon first, then re-apply. Last November, she ran in her first marathon, the challenging Myles Standish Marathon in Plymouth, Mass.

Accompanied in Minneapolis by her husband and her running companion, Lisa Drapeau, McCool is one of 25 long-distance runners hitting the streets this weekend to run in the marathon or its sister 10K race. Runners from a dozen different countries, ranging in age from 20 to 62, were selected because they benefit from medical devices to treat heart disease, diabetes, spinal disorders, and other serious conditions.

Maybe it’s the company she’s keeping this weekend, but McCool is starting to realize how her story touches others.

“I’m sort of catching on to that because I got a couple of good luck cards with messages in them that I have inspired this one or that one, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow,'” she said. “It feels nice to do that.”

“I’m trying to encourage others,” she said. “Through this process I realized that maybe I could help somebody else.”

Going forward, McCool hopes to organize a half marathon at Pineland to benefit the Brain Aneurysm Foundation and perhaps take a cross-country bicycle trip. While she plans to continue running in half marathons, she wants to get back to more hiking, which she’s cut back on to train for the marathon.

And she wants to keep getting better. McCool estimates that she is about 90-95 percent recovered from her illness. Doctors credit her active lifestyle prior to it for making her part of the 6.5 percent that can live independently.

Some days are still not as good as others. When she is tired, a leg will get weak and a foot will drag behind. She hopes it doesn’t happen Sunday and keep her from reaching her goal of a 12 1/2-minute mile.

The odds may be against her. McCool has overcome longer odds knowing that adversity is what she makes of it.

“You can choose to let it sink you or you can choose to rise above it,” she said. “If I want a better life, I have to rise above it and go forward.”