For most of the race, Krista DuChene was pretty sure she was going to defend her Canadian half-marathon title in Montreal on Sunday.

She wasn’t being cocky, she knew her fastest challenger wasn’t far behind, but her body felt great and she was speeding up.

Then, with five kilometres left to go in the 21.1-km race, her left leg started hurting and felt oddly weak.

The 37-year-old mother of three isn’t one to quit so she kicked up her speed another notch and kept going.

“Please, leg,” she told herself, “just hold on to the finish.”

It didn’t.

Just 500 metres from the win, her leg gave out.

“I came around the corner and I could see the finish line and it was like my leg was completely taken away from me,” she said. “I couldn’t put any weight on it.”

She didn’t know it then, but an undiagnosed stress fracture had turned into a full-blown fracture of her femur where it meets the hip bone.

That information would come later, when she had surgery at midnight to repair the break with a plate and three screws.

All she knew on the road Sunday morning was that she’d never experienced pain like that before. And one more thing: she was going to finish that race no matter what.

“I remember one person in the crowd yelled out, ‘Crawl if you have to’ and, in my mind I said, “You bet I will.”

Step by excruciating step, she hopped and limped her way to the finish line and, on the strength of the gap she’d built over the field before she broke her leg, finished in third place.

Her time of one hour 16 minutes and 37 seconds was three minutes behind winner Rachel Hannah of Toronto.

“Hey, I still got the bronze medal,” DuChene said in a telephone interview from her hospital bed in Montreal. “That’s pretty crazy.”

Elite athletes are often able to compete through pain, especially for a big event, but not many could do what DuChene did, said Peter Eriksson, head coach of Athletics Canada.

“When you know the type of injury she had, she shouldn’t even be able to walk but she’s a determined woman,” Eriksson said.

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“She’s a very tough cookie. She showed a similar spirit at the world championships, where she got dehydrated in the extremely hot marathon and she went as far as she could go.”

At that race in Moscow last August, DuChene collapsed at the 13-km mark and was one of two dozen women who failed to finish.

For endurance athletes like DuChene, who runs 180 kms a week during her marathon training season, something always hurts. That makes it hard to decipher when pain is a minor complaint and when it’s a serious warning.

Earlier in the week, DuChene had some pain at the front of her left leg but didn’t think it was too serious.

“It was a gamble to start the race,” she said. “I made that decision thinking that I might be sore at the end but certainly not this.”

DuChene holds the second-fastest female marathon time in Canadian history and the Brantford, Ont., native has been working on improving her time further for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

The 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this July and the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games are now off the table for DuChene.

“I’ve certainly had my tears, it’s emotional and the pain is excruciating but I will always see the glass as half full,” she said. “The Rio Olympics is still my goal. I’m definitely going to be running again.”

But, for now, she’ll settle for smaller goals.

“I’m using a bedpan to pee in so, right now, we’re talking about the basics of life.”

Getting out of the hospital and home to her 3-, 6- and 8-year-old children is at the top of her list.

“I’ll look back on this and this will be part of the past and I’m not afraid to do the work to recover,” she said.

“I’m always told I’m an inspiration. I’d kind of prefer not to do it this way, but, hey.”