Forum: My Mom The Runner
Published 1:30 am Saturday, June 6, 2026
In the spring of 1975, my mom decided to go for a run.
Eleven years earlier, when she began high school in 1964, girls couldn’t play competitive sports. In the mid-60s — eight years before Title IX and a decade before the running revolution swept across America — Wendy Wilson’s options were Cheerleading and Dance,”….and I wasn’t a cheerleader, and I wasn’t a dancer.”
Her parents didn’t exercise, except for her dad’s occasional round of golf. No girl she knew ran. “None of my friends were like, I’m going go for a run or to a track… it was never even a thing.”
“I was a little overweight my whole life but, in my 20s, it came to me that this identity I had as this kind of chubby kid wasn’t set in stone. I could exercise.”
Her very first run, in the dark morning hours around their Fremont rental house, turned into regular runs around Green Lake. And she kept running.
“I never really thought of myself as an athletic person. It wasn’t really in the female awareness growing up in the ’60s. And then I thought, well, I could maybe be that person.”
She kept running after she and my dad moved to Tacoma, with two kids under three. She’d hit the road as soon as Dad got home. “It was a cheap, easy way of having freedom, a time that wasn’t taken up in caring for my kids.” No music, no headphones, just the sound of her own breathing.
After moving to Shelton in 1981, she’d run the miles around Lake Limerick from our old house on East Ballantrae, past Banbury Beach, up to the St. Andrews straightaways, then across the Way to Tipperary cut-off, down the hill past the pro shop and golf course, then across the dirt levee and over the dock for the homestretch.
She remembers when we were young. “We used to go around the lake. I’d run, and you’d ride your bikes.” We’d try to keep pace with Mom on our one-speeds, getting off to push halfway up the steep hills.
In the 80s, she started entering races: the Point Defiance Zoo Run, Sound to Narrows, Cascade Run-Off, Forest Festival 10K, Lakefair Run and the Olympia half marathon. When the Y offered a marathon training group in 1983, she signed up with a friend and completed her first marathon that year, and another in 1985.
She ran, and in running, she showed us how to live. They both did, with Dad playing city league basketball or sweating on the Stairmaster or taking long rides on his Cannondale. They modeled for us the daily habit of moving your body, sweating out the stress, pushing yourself farther than you think you can go.
Mom got a total left knee replacement in 2012. The next year, she joined us on our first annual backpacking trip with two of her grandkids. She hasn’t missed a trip since.
She’s switched from running to walking and taking group exercise classes: yoga, line dancing, Tai Chi, senior fit, strength & cardio. Her right knee is showing signs of wear and tear — of those thousands of miles on pavement and hundreds of trips around Lake Limerick. Her surgery is scheduled for mid-June, and she’s determined to walk around the Lake again.
When I run from my house, escaping onto the Boeing trails and into the Japanese Gulch — with no headphones, just the sound of my own breathing – I follow the steps of my mom, who made a choice over 50 years ago to become something new: a runner.
Cory Armstrong-Hoss lives in Everett.
