Sitting inside the Rayback Collective on a recent cold evening, surrounded by friends and trays of strawberries, blackberries and cheese, Maor Tiyouri gave a sigh and a smile when asked why she was leaving Boulder, her successful training base for the past 10 years on her way to making three Olympic teams.

“Whew,” Tiyouri, 34, said. “That is a long story.”

The story started back in Israel growing up outside of Tel Aviv, where she began running at age 12 and soon was winning age group races on her way to setting multiple national records as she moved up into the senior ranks. The Boulder part of her racing journey began after she graduated from the University of San Francisco and moved to town in 2016. Her first coach in Boulder, Lee Troop, himself a three-time Olympian, helped her make the Israeli team competing in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Other local coaches followed, including former marathon world record holder Steve Jones, who guided her to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and inaugural Bolder Boulder winner Ric Rojas, who helped her train for this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.

“I was happy with the Olympics,” Tiyouri said, pulling herself up to her full 4-9 height as friends gathered around and complimented her. “Paris was my fastest Olympics and highest placing.”

Tiyouri clocked 2:33:37 in Paris after running 2:47:27 in Rio and 2:37:52 in Tokyo. Her personal best is 2:26:39 from this spring’s Amsterdam marathon. It has been a good run of success, and now, Tiyouri said, “I am going back to be with my family.”

A plangent note was discernible in her voice, as she is leaving the mountains and returning to Israel at a time of war and unrest, which has only increased since we first spoke in 2016. A friend asked if she wanted a beer.

“Yes,” she said, sensing that this occasion deserves a treat.

“What kind?”

“A Paloma,” she said, after a pause. Tiyouri had many friends to greet, and I struck up a conversation with new acquaintances. Talk turned to nature, something all can agree on, and how the largest organism in the world, it is said, is an aspen grove of tens of thousands of trees in Utah, seemingly separate when seen from above the ground, but really all one one organism connected beneath the surface.After her first Olympic marathon, Tiyouri said of her experience: “It’s so great to see how sports bring people together from all races, size, gender. It’s incredible.”

Her comment reminded me of an experience I had at the Belgrade Marathon years ago. I was there during the height of the war in neighboring Bosnia. Because of the war, runners had to fly into Sofia or Budapest and take a 10-hour bus ride to get to the marathon. I was running in a pack with a new friend, a Bosnian who wore a shirt that read “Mir” (“Peace”). Nearing the halfway point we reached an aid station. I grabbed a cup from a volunteer’s hand, drank some water and handed the cup, as we often do in marathons, to my new friend. He drank some and handed it back.

To my right came another runner I had met at a prerace gathering; he was Serbian, a member of the Orthodox Christian community. I handed the cup to him. He hesitated, and I could sense his reaction, visibly tensing up at the thought of drinking from the same cup as a Bosnian Muslim.

We ran on, and instead of tossing the cup aside for volunteers to gather, for some reason I held on to it, water jostling over the sides. Suddenly, the Serbian runner reached over, took the cup and drank from it. He handed the cup back, and I handed it directly back to the Bosnian on my left, who, emptying the cup, tossed it aside.

Many of you have run the Bolder Boulder, the New York City marathon or another large, international race. You know that when we run together, clad in only singlets and shorts, barriers of race, color and creed vanish as we struggle and run on together, sharing our sweat, oxygen debt and stories. The “personas” we all wear (Latin for the mask worn by actors on a stage) drop away and our true selves begin to emerge: fellow runners and marathoners, fellow human beings.

I wanted to tell this to Tiyouri, but she was engaged in talking to friends and had much to do before leaving town. I bundled up and stepped outside. It was cold, and in the vast darkness of the new moon, there was no light. I stepped into a puddle, my running shoe and sock getting soaked. The chill made the cold night seem even darker.

Follow Sandrock on Instagram: @MikeSandrock.