CLEVELAND — For Lilliam Diaz, long distance running is her passion, but it wasn’t always.

“I got into running in 2017, when my father was diagnosed with cancer, and he's a former athlete in the land of Puerto Rico, that's where I was born and raised,” said Diaz.

Her father refused to get treatment, so she said she started running in hopes that if she did something she never thought she could do, maybe her father would change his mind.

Although he never received treatment, he is still alive, and Diaz is still running.

“I will never stop running only because he was a former athlete,” Diaz said. “And I know how, like, that was his passion, and that's something that I forever hold with me. It will be running.”

Fast forward to the pandemic and Diaz is ramping up that newfound passion and using it to relieve stress and fill added free time.

“This is the most I have ever trained because you're outside. So nothing is cancelled when you're outside,” Diaz said. “And so we put a lot of mileage and since the pandemic, we had to change our goals. So instead of running for races, it was increasing your miles and hoping for maybe becoming an ultra runner, something that you'll never have done before, but there's nothing else besides running, just run, run, run.”

With live races starting back up again, adaptations have been made. Jay Toole is the race director at Runiversity, a race timing and directing company, that hosted “Run the Land,” a competition between east- and west-side Cleveland.

“So, you want to make sure everyone's masked up before the run until they get into the crash shoot. And then when they start, they're welcome to remove their mask for the entire duration of the run. And then as they finished, they'll put their mask back on,” Toole said. “So everything's kind of changed as far as your typical race setup, because at the end of the day, it's the safety of everyone that matters.”

Toole sends the runners off in small groups and there are no pre-race or after-race parties. For Diaz, she’s just happy to run and see her friends.

“I’m excited,” Diaz said. “It’s Cleveland, it’s beautiful, it's sunny, what else could you ask for.”

Diaz has run three marathons and placed high in her age group, and that’s just the start. She’s already on track to run 500 more miles this year.

“That is a whole lot of miles because of the pandemic,” said Diaz.

New miles are leading to new goals and new experiences.

“Now that full marathon seems so easy,” Diaz said. “Why not just shoot for a 50k?”

She is using nature’s treadmill to find her happy place during sad times.