“People complain about a Monday morning. I’m just thankful I have another Monday morning,” Vicki Foltz shouts, thrusting her arms into the cold night air as she stands on the steps outside her house bidding good-bye to a visitor.
Whatever the day, Foltz pours her heart and soul into every waking hour. If she isn’t tearing down a barn or building a house, she’s volunteering at the Sultan-Sky Valley Information Center.
Or performing any one of a dozen other projects she has going.
Or traveling back to her native Slovenia.
Or any place else her fancy takes her.
Idle feet make for an idle mind. And the 63-year-old Foltz has but one speed: fast.
One day last month, she rushed into the Monroe Fred Meyer store shopping for paint. She does that a lot. Rushes, that is.
It’s almost as if she’s in a race against time with everything she does. As her good friend Doris Brown Heritage explains, “Every day, she milks it for all it’s worth.”
Foltz even talks fast, the words tripping off her tongue so rapidly that sometimes they collide.
There are things to do and places to go. And who knows how much time to do it all in.
This much is certain. We are each given one life to live. And Vicki Foltz is living hers to the fullest. She will not be cheated. Nor was she cheated as a world-class distance runner in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
What’s that, you ask. Vicki Foltz was a world-class runner? “Our Vicki Foltz?” newcomer friends of hers to the Skykomish Valley might ask.
That she was.
Had her foot not gotten entangled with a fence after a race in Denmark in 1972, she might have been an Olympic athlete in the 1500 meters. “My body cleared the fence,” she said, “my leg stayed behind.”
And in a heartbeat, her chances of making the U.S. team for the ‘72 Munich Olympics were dashed because of two broken toes. “I had never been so fit in my life,” she recalled, noting that she had moved to New Zealand so she could train with the world renown coach Arthur Lydiard. “Oh well, I had a nice time in Denmark anyway.”
She always tries to have a good time. What’s the point in moping? Life’s too short.
Enjoy.
“I don’t believe in setting limitations just because of a number,” she said, referring to her age. “I live life as I always have, working hard and staying positive. Really, I’ve been blessed with a great deal of energy and zest for life.”
Classic example of the Foltzian Philosophy. It’s 1981. She’s again in New Zealand, this time for a world masters track and field meet. She’s just turned 35 and is in fine fettle.
But which event to enter her in? Why not all of the distance races, her husband, Don, who is also her long-time coach, suggests. So for the next week or so, Vicki races every other day, winning gold medals in four of five events. On the final day, she has enough energy left to run 26.2 miles for a gold in the marathon.
And later that evening, she goes dancing. And once again, she proves that “the words ‘old’ and ‘can’t’ are not in my vocabulary.”
Run and fun were synonymous to Vicki Foltz. Well, after a rocky start anyway.
“I did not (like running at first),” she said. “It took me years to like it.”
Initially, she called it a “waste of energy.”
“Why not be out fixing the barn roof instead of running in circles,” she asked rhetorically with a defiant little grin.
Had it not been for the man she married, Vicki might never have become a runner.
She and Don met in St. Louis in the early ’60s. She was a newcomer to this country, working at a job “stuffing envelopes” for $35 a week and living at an Evangeline residence run by the Salvation Army. Don was taking a post-graduate class at Saint Louis University.
They met at a YMCA swimming pool. “I creamed him a couple of laps,” Vicki said with a laugh.
Their first date was on a Mississippi riverboat. Often when they went out after that, they’d go swimming, biking or running. “Always something active,” Vicki said.
Don had been a very good collegiate runner himself and recognized talent when he saw it. And Vicki had talent.
Not only was she built for running — a small, wiry frame — but she had a very slow pulse rate “and very good legs,” Don said.
A natural runner? “I think so,” he said softly.
“I was not,” Vicki protested loudly, sitting next to him in the living room of their home. “I worked my butt off.”
Her workouts were on an indoor track at the YMCA, 26 laps to a mile. Her mile time: a very respectable 6 minutes, 28 seconds.
Four months after they started dating, they were married and making their way across the country to the Northwest, settling between Monroe and Sultan.
On the journey west, they got to see America, but not exactly the way Vicki had envisioned. “I want to see bright lights,” she said. Then, with her incredible sense of timing, she added, “So what does he take me to? Campsites.”
So they could get in a good run at the end of each day.
Vicki was soon running for the Seattle Olympic Club. In her first workout, the coach had her strut her stuff around a track near Greenlake. “I felt like a prize cow,” Vicki said, her words dripping with sarcasm.
Before the ’60s were over, she would go on to national and international fame as a member of the Falcon Track Club, winning the USA and Canadian cross country championships in 1967 and finishing second to teammate Doris Brown Heritage in the international championships in 1968. She and Brown, who won five consecutive international titles, led the Falcon club to back-to-back world team titles in ‘68 and ‘69.
By then, running had become fun for Foltz, and much of that had to do with the Falcon team. The runners would go out to the Foltz’s home, where Don had constructed a track through the woods, for weekend runs. Sometimes he’d take them up in the mountains.
“When we had a concession stand at SPU,” Heritage said, “we didn’t get in the car to go buy weiners and buns, we’d run to the store to get them. Running was adventuresome and fun for us.”
The team’s coach, Dr. Ken Foreman, recalled Vicki Foltz as always being “filled with joy. Alive!”
“She always brought her full self to the starting line,” Foreman said in an e-mail from his home in Hawaii. “She competed with courage, did not give any opponent an easy race. Perhaps she competed so well because she loved to run. I have seen her (with sweat-soaked friends) come running from the woods with flowers in her hand.
“Vicki Foltz was a pleasure to work with. Never asked why. Just went out and did it.”
She hasn’t changed.
Vicki rarely competes anymore, but when she does, she gives it her best. In 2001, she ran a five-kilometer race and won the women’s 50-59 division.
Then, knowing her, she probably went home and painted the house.
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