Crestview woman takes on Boston Marathon

CRESTVIEW — Ten years ago, Mary Valdez hated running. Last week, she ran the Boston Marathon.

Valdez, a Crestview resident, finished the April 16 race in just under four hours, with an official time of 3:56.42 in cold, wet and windy conditions.

“Running, to me, is like coffee for other people,” she said, adding that she gets grumpy if she doesn’t have her morning run. “When I’m going to bed, I’ve got my workout clothes prepared.”

Running is a major part of her life now, but it wasn’t always that way.

“When I was growing up, I hated (physical education),” Valdez said. As an adult, she made the decision to start working out to get in shape.

“I started running and I hated it,” she said. “Three miles on a treadmill was the most painful thing. It was just miserable to me.”

It was her sister who inspired Valdez to take on her first marathon. Her thinking was that if her sister could do it, so could she. She started training and ran that first marathon in 2010.

“I hated every minute of it,” she said. “It was awful and I never wanted to run again.”

But she was motivated to beat her time and ran another marathon soon after. Before long, she was running longer races, including 50- and 100-mile races. She won the 100-mile Wildcat 100 Ultramarathon in Pensacola in 2016, beating out the next-closest female competitor by more than eight hours.

Valdez had qualified for the Boston Marathon prior to this year, but never seriously entertained the idea of competing in it.

“I didn’t think that I belonged at Boston,” she said. “Those are the elite [runners]. I didn’t belong there, so I didn’t even attempt to go through the process because it was this big, scary thing.”

While working for Gordon Martial Arts in Crestview, Valdez trained and started to improve on her race times. After she qualified for the Boston Marathon at races in both Pensacola and Panama City Beach, her friends pushed her to take on the challenge in Boston.

When she got to Boston and the day of the race finally came, she did not get the warm weather she had hoped for.

“I could not feel my toes for the first three miles of that race,” she said. “I don’t do well in cold.”

She realized that it was going to be a rough morning on the shuttle ride from Boston to the starting point of the marathon in the suburb of Hopkinton, Mass.

“I’m looking out the windows and I see snow on the side of the road.”

The snow was not a welcome sight for a Floridian without much in the way of winter clothes. Neither was the rain that did not let up for the duration of the race and became heavy at times.

Despite the poor conditions, Valdez pushed through, motivated by friends and family who accompanied her, as well as spectators along the course route.

“You hear them cheering before you even approach that city,” she said, referring to the eight cities the route winds its way through. She remembers hearing one spectator shout words of encouragement to the “lady in pink” as she passed the infamous Heartbreak Hill.

After crossing the finish line and reuniting with the friends and family that came to support her, the reality of her accomplishment set in and she fought back tears while posing for a victory photo.

“I would not have had the guts to go if it were not for my friends pushing me along to do it.”

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Crestview woman takes on Boston Marathon