CONCORD — Concord elementary school teacher Sue Ann Martin had three passions in life: her family, her students, and running.

As a fitting tribute to the former Broken Ground Elementary School fifth-grade teacher, who died unexpectedly in 2010 from a massive infection, her family is sponsoring a road race to raise money for scholarships in her name.

This year's is Sunday, Oct. 7, when hundreds of runners are expected to take part in the 3rd annual Sue Ann Martin Road Race, a 5K race that starts at the school where she taught for a decade. The race begins at noon with registration starting at 10 a.m. The cost is $20 per person or $40 per family. School athletic teams are welcome at a fee of $10 per team member.

Tom Martin, Sue Ann's husband, said everyone is welcome, particularly those who want to walk, like himself.

So far, he said, about $45,000 has been raised for scholarships, with $13,000 awarded to students. Each year, the number of race participants has declined — 500 the first, 300 the second — but his hope is before the numbers peter out completely that ultimately enough money is raised to be able to give a scholarship to each student who was in his wife's fifth-grade class.

Sue Ann Martin, by all accounts, was a remarkable teacher, an educator who inspired students to want to learn and do more and a teacher long remembered by her pupils as one of the best.

She was a passionate marathoner who ran every morning on rutted, unpaved streets and through cornfields, delighting in every step. She studied to be a journalist but in her mid-30s, with three young children, returned to school to obtain a master's in education and begin a new career as an elementary school teacher.

Her students remember her as the fifth-grade teacher everyone wanted to have because she was tough but fun-loving and dedicated to her students, whom she treated like family. One student, who was awarded one of the Martin scholarships, recalled her contagious laugh, her dancing with a skeleton in the classroom corner and rewarding students with a trip to Friendly's if they earned a third “triple hundred” in a spelling test.

“I remember being happy in fifth grade, being challenged in my learning and coming to the realization that I was capable of anything,” Catie Donlon wrote of her year as a student in Mrs. Martin's fifth-grade class.

Martin's life ended prematurely on April 9, 2010, from a massive blood infection which began as strep throat. Martin, 50, was in excellent health, an avid runner up at 5 a.m. each day to run the streets of Concord, to stay in shape for the races and marathons she ran — New York, Chicago and U.S. Marine Corps Washington, D.C., marathons, to name a few.

“She just did not stop,” said her husband, Tom. “She was just this phenomenal teacher who worked a lot of hours.”

She had graduated from Indiana University, where she met her future husband, with a major in journalism and then obtained her master's degree in business. She worked in the human resources department at a bank marketing association in northwest Indiana. In 1987, she and her husband relocated to Concord with their two young daughters. Their son was born four years later.

As a mother of three young children and in her mid-30s, Martin decided to return to the classroom and earn a master's degree in education from Notre Dame College in Manchester.

Her first teaching job was at Woodside Pre-School. She later taught for a year at Beaver Meadow before moving on to Broken Ground Elementary School where she taught for the last 10 years of her life, according to her husband.

When she died in 2009, family and friends, as well as the Broken Ground Elementary School community, were all stunned.

Martin headed up the team competing in Krypto, a math competition, and published the school's creative-writing magazine, in addition to teaching, and she just didn't have time to be sick.

The week before Easter 2010, she had a sore throat and developed strep symptoms, her husband said. She continued working and with Easter coming up, delayed seeing a doctor until the Monday after the holiday, and then only after a full day of teaching, of course. That night she developed severe back pain and the following morning ended up in the emergency room at Concord Hospital.

The strep had spread throughout her body and lodged in her back, her husband said. Sepsis, a blood infection, had taken over, but doctors, he explained, just couldn't figure it out quickly enough. And Sue Ann was not one to complain.

“She went in on a Tuesday morning and Tuesday night she really started to have problems. On Wednesday she was in distress and transported to Dartmouth-Hitchcock (Medical Center in Lebanon),” he said. She died that Friday. Her death certificate listed the cause of death as sepsis from Group A streptococcus; necrotizing myositis, which means the infection spread to the muscle tissues, what's commonly referred to as flesh-eating disease.

“It was just one of those tragedies,” her husband said.

Martin said the family met with the quality control board, a mix of doctors and citizens, at Concord Hospital, not in a hostile way, but to try and understand what went wrong so that medical staff could learn from the tragedy and hopefully prevent it from happening to someone else.

Martin hopes talking about sepsis and what happened to his wife will lead others to get earlier treatment and not put off going to the doctor. September, he pointed out, is Sepsis Awareness Month. According to the Sepsis Alliance, more than 200,000 people die each year in the United States from sepsis; worldwide, a million lives are lost annually.

Martin said he and the couple's children, Chelsea, 27, Kelly, 25 and Robby, 21, are still “kind of fumbling through life. We're OK on the outside. The kids are doing well.”

pgrossmith@unionleader.com