Maria Michta-Coffey, of Lake Grove, headed to World Athletics Championships in Tokyo

On many days of year, two-time Olympian Maria Michta-Coffey can be found scurrying around to patients while working as a physician assistant at South Shore University Hospital.

But soon the 39-year-old Lake Grove mother of two children under 7 is hoping to make yet another stride later this month when she competes in race walking at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo.

On Thursday, her colleagues at Northwell Health’s South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore gave her a pep rally for an upcoming world championship appearance that could culminate an athletic career that so far includes 49 national titles and seven world championships.

“It's been incredible that who I am as an athlete has only been able to grow over the years, and I've never had to compromise or give it up, and I've only been able to have it blend and complement the other aspects of my life,” said Michta-Coffey.

Race walking involves making strides toward an endpoint, according to an article in Olympics.com. The sport contrasts with running in several ways. Specifically, participants can’t raise both feet from the floor as they may do in running.

For Michta-Coffey, the road to the upcoming championships has been a long one that even she describes as atypical. She played soccer but had her eye on winter track to stay in shape for a lacrosse season that never materialized.

Pete McNeill, one of Michta-Coffey’s coaches at Sachem High School, remembers talking to Michta-Coffey as a middle schooler and soon realizing that she was not like other children her age.

“Maria, she gave me the whole outline of what sports she was doing, what conflict she had,” he said.

He later added: “It was like talking to a college kid instead of a middle schooler. So, we knew she was a different person.”

Alex Young, another one of her high school coaches, recalls that Michta-Coffey wrote in her journal about wanting to take part in the Olympics one day.

“She set a goal, and she pursued,” Young said.

Michta-Coffey’s competed in the Olympics games in London in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, but that was far from the end of her story.

Michta-Coffey graduated in 2008 with a biology major and chemistry minor from C.W. Post College, which is now LIU Post, Northwell Health said. She was valedictorian.

She earned her doctorate in biomedical science from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where her work focused on hepatitis C, Northwell Health said. She also spent three years working as an adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College.

She later decided to become a physician assistant — a decision rooted in wanting to utilize her scientific knowledge to empower patients.

And at work, her physical training and academic achievement merged, she said. Her co-workers joke that she is usually the first person to make it to the patients because she moves so fast. And just like being an athlete, her work as a physician assistant means training often when few are watching.

“Whether it's a goal to make a world championship team or a goal to get your patient out as fast as possible, in the best possible health, either way, we're always working towards it,” she said.

Over the years, her training has evolved just as her life has. Michta-Coffey is now a wife, mother of a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old, and a hospital physician assistant who works three 12½-hour shifts a week.

During the height of the COVID pandemic, she worked, showered, cooked to get off the germs, and did two workouts a day.

“I kind of was burning the candle at both ends, which I've been guilty of a few times in my life,” she admitted.

Now, she realizes that less is more. She mostly trains four days a week on the days that she doesn’t work.

“I have to cross-train. I have to do a lot of stroller jogging, but it’s just being flexible [and] adaptable has allowed me to keep the career going,” she said.

Michta-Coffey at the point in her career where she doesn’t quite feel comfortable using the word retirement, but feels that she doesn’t want to compete at such as a high level in part because it has at times been a stressor for her family.

Her next chapter, she said, will include coaching.

“I love the pursuit of something. I love the journey of being a part of something every day, that grind that just makes you feel good. It's part of who I am,” she said.

By Tiffany Cusaac-Smith

tiffany.cusaac-smith@newsday.com@T_Cusaac

Tiffany Cusaac-Smith is a general assignment reporter for Newsday. She previously worked at USA TODAY and is an alum of Howard University.