And then there was her personal approach to preparing first-time marathoners to toe the starting line. Over the years she took thousands of runners on countless miles of training runs leading up to Boston Marathon day.

“It’s fun,” she said in an interview posted on YouTube. “I mean, this is what I live for. I want to see people succeed. This is life-changing for them to be able to run a marathon and be inspired by a charity and earn their spot at the starting line that way. For them, it’s the Super Bowl of running.”

Ms. Hurley, who helped raise her final millions while running her last two Boston Marathons after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, died Nov. 1. She was 62 and lived in North Andover.

“I always love to be known as Boston’s biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Hurley, a cheerleader in high school and later for the New England Patriots, said in the 2020 YouTube interview with Thom Gilligan, founder and chief executive of Marathon Tours & Travel.

Trading football field sidelines for road racecourses, she cheered on year after year of runners, even while running in the marathons herself.

“In addition to being everyone’s cheerleader, she was everyone’s mom. She really cared about all her runners,” said Sarah Wessmann, team captain and a member of each year’s marathon contingent for Last Call Foundation. The charity, inspired by the heroic life and line-of-duty death in 2014 of her then-fiancé, Boston firefighter Michael Kennedy, funds education and research to advance firefighter safety.

Near the end of each Boston Marathon, Ms. Hurley’s son Ryan McGillivray recalled, she could be spotted with her arm around the waist of another runner — helping a member of her charity team or even a stranger whose strength was fading.

From the beginning of marathon preparations, Ms. Hurley stressed that all runners should have “their Boylston Street moment, hearing the crowd roar and seeing the finish line in the distance, and the happiness that brings,” said Ryan, who lives in Wrentham and is vice president of operations for DMSE Sports, the event management firm founded by his father, Dave McGillivray.

During weeks of training runs, Ms. Hurley helped newcomers prepare for the vagaries of the potentially punishing weather, and for the constancy of Heartbreak Hill.

In February she would hold the fund-raising “Superhero 17” – a 17-mile run along the marathon course in which participants ran dressed as superheroes, their merriment a distraction from the arduous training workout.

And Ms. Hurley “didn’t just run the marathon. She had you learn about the course and the history and why things matter,” said Wessmann, who was among the runners Ms. Hurley helped train.

Ms. Hurley made sure runners knew about legendary Olympian Johnny Kelley, who completed the Boston Marathon nearly 60 times. She led training runs to Kelley’s statue in Newton so everyone could pay their respects.

“It’s a cliché,” Wessmann said, “but she really did put the fun in fund-raising.”

The third of four sisters, Susan Ann Hurley was born on April 8, 1963, and grew up in North Reading.

Her mother, Sylvia Bidmead Hurley, was a real estate title examiner, and her father, James Hurley, was assistant register at Middlesex Family and Probate Court.

A cheerleading squad champion at North Reading High School, Ms. Hurley became a runner early on.

“I started running when I used to miss the bus in high school and I haven’t stopped,” she told Boston Magazine just before the 2013 marathon. “I’m proud to say I am a person who has worked out her whole life and never stopped and rarely missed a day.”

Ms. Hurley, who attended Emerson College, formerly was married to Dave McGillivray, with whom she had two sons, Ryan and Max.

She was as enthusiastic a mother as she was training runners and raising millions, said Max, who lives in Los Angeles.

“Energetic doesn’t even cover it,” he said. “Her energy, her light, her celebratory nature was just infectious. Everyone will say it: she was a cheerleader in every sense of the word.”

Ms. Hurley found ways to make the marathon experience possible for participants facing a wide variety of hurdles, from spinal cord injuries to living without homes.

“The list goes on and on,” Max said, “and no person, in my eyes, was ever turned away from her light.”

Russell Hoyt, president and chief executive of Team Hoyt and the Hoyt Foundation, said Ms. Hurley was instrumental in helping the family organizations expand their reach and ensure their legacy after the deaths of his father, Dick Hoyt, and brother, Rick Hoyt, who had pioneered duo wheelchair road racing.

Russell said Ms. Hurley helped the organizations reach beyond the Boston Marathon to other major events, and to launch the Dick and Judy Hoyt “Yes You Can” inclusion grants, named for his parents, to assist families in getting their children with disabilities included in activities alongside non-disabled peers.

“Sue helped us do something new and more powerful,” Hoyt said, adding that “she was the type of person who made you want to be a better person yourself, just by spending time with her.”

A service has been held for Ms. Hurley, who in addition to her two sons, mother, and former husband leaves three sisters, Lisa First of Alvin, Texas, Mary of Norfolk, and Cheryl Cuoco of Wrentham; her fiancé, Barry Foland of Owings Mills, Md.; and three stepchildren, Elle, Luke, and Chloe McGillivray, all of North Andover.

In August, Ms. Hurley spoke at the opening of Gronk Playground on the Charles River Esplanade, which was funded by her friend Rob Gronkowski, the former star New England Patriots tight end.

Gronkowski was overcome with emotion more than once, speaking a few feet away from where she sat next to Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

When it was her turn to speak, Ms. Hurley thanked Gronkowski for his philanthropy and floated an idea: “Can we just make it official and sign him for a day so he can retire a Patriot?”

Several days after she died, Kraft and Gronkowski announced they would honor her wish.

On Instagram, Gronkowski wrote that “her strength and resilience were truly inspirational,” and added that “without Susan, there would be no Gronk Playground.”

In a CBS Boston interview posted on YouTube in 2023, a year after she was diagnosed, Ms. Hurley was back to her energetic pace, managing 500 runners and pushing that year’s fund-raising past the $4 million mark.

The cancer diagnosis had come as a shock, she said. A doctor broke the news a day after she had completed a 17-mile training run. In that interview, she was grateful for a reprieve treatment had brought.

“It is a miracle. I believe it’s God’s hand,” she said. “I really, truly, truly believe that there is a plan for me and I’m not ready to leave this planet and leave this earth. There’s work for me to do here.”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.