Stacey Fornarotto (OMBA’25) Ran the Boston Marathon for the Brittany Fund

When Stacey Fornarotto laced up her running shoes for the first time in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had just upended life around the world. For Stacey, the impact was deeply personal: she lost her fiancé in May of that year. Her brother, an avid runner, encouraged her to try running to support her mental health. So she ran—often, and with purpose.

“I had never been athletic. Sports honestly scared me,” Stacey recalls. But running gave her structure and a goal to move toward. As winter approached, she invested in a treadmill with built-in training programs and began signing up for virtual 5Ks. Race medals started arriving in the mail. Soon, 5Ks turned into 10Ks. And when her brother told her, “If you can do a 10K, you can run a half marathon,” she took him up on it.

In 2022, she ran her first half marathon in New Orleans, with her brother also in the race. Though they didn’t run side by side, she finished just five minutes behind him—a small but powerful moment of validation. “That gave me the tiniest confidence boost,” she says. It was enough to set her sights on something even bigger: a full marathon.

That “ridiculous idea,” as she called it at the time, became reality when she completed the Houston Marathon in early 2023.

Later that year, Stacey was accepted into Boston University’s Online MBA program. She had a new goal: to run the Boston Marathon while pursuing her MBA. That dream came full circle when she was invited to join The Brittany Fund for Trauma and Recovery’s team—an organization founded by Brittany Loring, a survivor of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Stacey was drawn to the Fund’s mission of supporting trauma victims with adaptive equipment. After what she had endured during the pandemic, it resonated on a personal level.

Though she had logged countless virtual Boston Marathons on her treadmill, running the real thing—with crowds lining the streets and her family cheering—was a different experience entirely. “It was an emotional, full-circle experience I’ll never forget,” she says.

Today, Stacey is still fundraising for The Brittany Fund through the end of May. She balances running, OMBA coursework, and her role as a physician assistant in internal medicine. She lives in New Jersey and works in Pennsylvania, finding time for family and friends whenever she can.

If you would like to support the Brittany Fund, navigate to the donation page.

Content and reflections are courtesy of Stacey Fornarotto.