enlarge Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Rachel Higgins, who has cystic fibrosis, will be running with Team CF in the Beach to Beacon 10K road race Saturday. The 25-member squad includes two other CF patients.

Everyone running in the Beach to Beacon road race has some sort of pre-race routine.

Some will stretch. Others will hydrate. Still others will close their eyes and visualize themselves gliding effortlessly along the 6.2-mile course from Cape Elizabeth's Crescent Beach to Portland Head Light.

Then there's Rachel Higgins.

Early Saturday morning, like she does every morning and evening, Higgins will get out of bed, put on a black vest with two air intakes on the front and hook herself up to an air compressor on the floor of her bedroom. Then she'll stand there for 15 minutes while the contraption pummels her chest and back with rapid-fire air bursts.

Next, she'll fire up her nebulizer (a high-tech mist inhaler) and spend another 30 minutes or so breathing in a mix of antibiotics and a high-concentration saline solution – one to kill the organisms constantly growing in her lungs, the other to loosen up the mucus that collected there overnight.

Then, and only then, will she reach for her running shoes.

Higgins, 41, has cystic fibrosis.

And yes, she's going to finish this race – one way or another – for the fourth time.

"The last two-tenths of a mile – that's when I run," Higgins said, sitting Thursday in her Veranda Street kitchen with its distant view of Portland Head. "Otherwise I jog or, if I need to, I walk."

Why do it at all?

"My mother," she said with a smile.

That would be Joline Pequinot of Brunswick, who this weekend will run in her seventh straight Beach to Beacon.

Pequinot, by the way, is one month shy of 70. And if you're getting the feeling that this is about a lot more than a road race, you're right.

It's about taking whatever life throws at you – and running with it.

"My goal, obviously, is to beat my 70-year-old mother," Higgins said, again smiling. "If she can do this, I can do this. That's kind of how it all started."

It's been 46 years since Pequinot gave birth prematurely to the first of her three children, a girl named Renee. Five days later, the baby died of complications from cystic fibrosis.

"I had never even heard of cystic fibrosis," Pequinot recalled this week. "I didn't know what it was."

Put simply, it's a genetic disease in which the body produces an unusually think, sticky mucus – and then has a hard time getting rid of it.

In some cases, the mucus clogs up the lungs and causes chronic, life-threatening respiratory infections. In others, it gums up the pancreas and blocks its ability to produce enzymes needed to break down food.

After Renee died, Pequinot gave birth to a son. This time, much to her and her husband's relief, cystic fibrosis was nowhere to be found.

But then came Rachel, who was diagnosed with the disease at birth and spent the first three months of her life at a hospital in New York, where the family lived at the time. Both her lungs and her digestive system were affected – she was only weeks old when doctors removed a major portion of her intestinal tract.

To this day, Pequinot can remember standing over her baby daughter in the hospital nursery and asking a doctor how long Rachel might live.

"She told me two years, maybe 10 at the most," Pequinot recalled. "We didn't have much hope."

But then, in the midst of her grief, Pequinot spoke at length with an enlightened social worker who insisted it was far too soon to give up.

"That's when a light went on," Pequinot said. "That light said, 'Treat this child like any other.' And that's what we did."

There were challenges, of course.

Periodically during her childhood and adolescent years, Higgins had to be hospitalized to beat back respiratory infections and the various other complications that come with cystic fibrosis.

And not a day went by without home-based therapy – the air vest had not yet been invented,...