Sunday, Oct. 8, was the perfect day to run the Chicago Marathon. 

The sky was overcast, the temperature was a cool 42 degrees and a slight breeze rolled through downtown off Lake Michigan.

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Memphian Dory Gaston hit the pavement with stride. She raced through the downtown cityscape at her own pace. She swung past her husband and kids three separate times, pausing briefly to take photos. Then, four hours and 20 minutes later, she pushed over the finish line like hundreds of other participants. 

This was not her first marathon. It was her 11th.

It was not her personal record.

It was her fulfillment of a personal promise. 

And that’s what makes the story of this Memphian so wonderful. It’s a guide for us all, really, about how to be a bada--. 

Gaston is undoubtedly one of those. She’s also “Strong AF.” She wears bracelets to prove it.

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Because this Chicago Marathon was not only 26.2 miles of sweat and exhaustion. It also was a race she completed following exhaustive chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. 

“I had my 14th round of chemotherapy that Tuesday, and five days later, I finished the marathon on a Sunday,” Gaston said. 

Yep! After five months of aggressive chemical drug therapy strong enough to make anyone feel like complete crap, she never slowed down. 

In fact, the only doubt Gaston ever had about running the race was whether she could convince her doctor to let her do it. 

“It’s funny because sometimes I see my doctor at Orangetheory,” Gaston said. “So he knew I was working out. But I didn’t say anything to him for the longest time because I didn’t know how the chemo was going to affect me.”

The running, supposedly, is the easy part. 

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She runs on Mondays. And Tuesdays. And Wednesdays. And — well, every day of the week. 

Sometimes she runs late at night, just around the block.

Sometimes she runs 15 miles at 4 a.m., just for the heck of it.

But every day she runs at least 1 mile. She’s been doing so for more than a year, even on days she has chemotherapy or a biopsy. Last year, she ran more than 1,800 miles. Tuesday will be 676 days in a row. 

Most of the time, she runs in a pack. Following the tragic news of Eliza Fletcher’s death in September 2022, she paired up with a group of moms from St. Louis Catholic School to start running early in the mornings. 

“My friends joke that I’m a bully because I’m always pushing everyone to get out and run with me,” she said. 

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Her friends call it “positive peer pressure.” 

But that’s what it takes to be a great runner: discipline. 

And that’s why, in May, Gaston felt like she was in the best shape of her life. She had just set a new half-marathon personal record. 

But she also found a lump on her breast.

She knew immediately that it needed to be checked. 

“I was kind of freaked out at first because my mom had breast cancer,” she said. “She passed away when I was 17 years old.”

Gaston is 39 years old. Sure enough, the tests revealed she had cancer, too.

That was the moment the lives of the Gaston family seemed destined to be flipped upside down.

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Except Dory Gaston, a bada--, wouldn’t let that happen.

Every morning she woke up early to run, and she never missed her kids’ after-school activities. 

Gaston, a dentist, didn’t take a day off of work because of chemotherapy. 

“She’s been so strong through all of this, there are days I have to remind myself that she’s going through chemo,” said Gaston’s husband, Greg Gaston Jr. “Sometimes you would never know otherwise.”

But everyone in Gaston’s life rallied around her for the moments when her spirits flagged. 

Erin Arbogast, a mom in the running group, gifted Gaston a booklet of notes written by friends and family that she can read every morning as inspiration. 

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St. Louis Catholic School, which Gaston’s children attend, held a “Wear Pink” day the week of the Chicago Marathon. Many students wore “Dory Strong” T-shirts that were made through Grind City Designs. 

In an effort to keep her hair, Gaston has been undergoing a tedious process called cold capping, which chills her scalp throughout chemotherapy infusions. It requires constant changing of a royal blue cap that straps over her head, but friends and family have repeatedly come to the house to help her switch it out every few hours. 

“She’s never going to say that she needs anything,” Arbogast said. “But it’s being there, showing up for chemo, or cold capping, or a 5 a.m. run, that we know means the most to her.”

Her friends showed up en masse on Aug. 19, Gaston’s birthday. 

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By hosting a backyard workout at her trainer Beth Bush’s house. There were 11 women who showed up to get fit alongside her, tossing medicine balls, running laps and dragging tires across the driveway. 

So, who would Dr. Phil Lammers be to tell Gaston this July that she couldn’t run the Chicago Marathon?

“He knew Tuesdays, the day I would go in to get chemo, were the mornings I would go on my long runs,” Gaston said. “One day, he finally asked me, ‘Are you training for something?’

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“I told him about the Chicago Marathon. He said, ‘If you know you’re feeling good, you can do it.’”

Gaston, wearing pink, ran through the streets of Chicago as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, inspiring all of her family and friends around her. 

That’s what a bada-- does. Let it be a lesson to all of us that life’s challenges do not have to serve as roadblocks to our aspirations. 

“Those first four rounds of chemo were rough,” Gaston said. “It would kind of take me down. But I never stopped. I had a goal. I said, ‘I’m training for Chicago. I’m going to run this. I have to keep going.’”

On Tuesday, Gaston will get closer to the finish line of her most important race yet. It will be her final round of chemotherapy.

In December, she will have a mastectomy and reconstruction surgery. That’s when her streak of consecutive days running will be forced to come to an end. 

“I think that’s going to be harder for me than 16 rounds of chemo,” she said. 

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But, before that happens, she plans to run the Dec. 2 St. Jude Marathon in Memphis. Suddenly, it has more meaning than she ever realized. 

Through the cancer process, Gaston learned she has a genetic mutation that makes her more likely to get cancer at a young age. 

She had her children, Lucy, 8, and James, 4, tested for it. They share the same genetic mutation that she does. 

So now they are patients at St. Jude.

Every three months, they’ll go in for tests in hopes of catching anything quickly. Their parents want to make the visits to the doctor feel normal. 

“They can’t completely understand this process yet,” Gaston said. “My daughter, Lucy, she’s like, ‘Mommy, you’re not sick. You run and exercise every day. You’re not sick.’”

But one day, like the rest of us, they too will realize their mom is a bada--.

Editor’s Note: Greg Gaston Jr.’s father, Greg Gaston Sr., is the host of The Daily Memphian Tigers Podcast with Greg Gaston.