womens running | Wing's World

Look carefully at the number on my mom’s back.

USATF Master’s Nationals, Huntsville, Alabama, July 19 2025

That “W 90” means what you think it means: the person wearing that number is a woman at least 90. I only saw one other “90” at the meet, and that was a man.

All weekend, people kept approaching my mom, Martha Klopfer, to tell her how inspirational she is. Her response was generally something along the lines of a shrug and an “All I do is keep going.”

Waving at her fans? No, probably just loosening up before the start of the 800.

Exactly.

Here she is, “keeping going” in the 800, at one p.m. in July in what felt like a caricature of a steamy Southern summer day:

And here are the results:

As you can see, she just nipped under the 6-minute mark. This was almost 30 seconds slower than a year ago. Just as she’d kept reminding us, Mom hadn’t been training as much; COVID, then the chaos of the death of their farm’s last two equines (the Brown Boys) had pulled her off her schedule.

That race earned her the rest of the afternoon off. The younger part of her support team–me, my oldest sister & her husband–took our GIANT rental car…

Couldn’t resist this picture of the hood, which a storm decorated with a tiny snippet of pink crepe myrtle!

…to Huntsville’s main tourist attraction, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

My brother-in-law kept coaching me: “Not a ‘rocket,’ Gretch–it’s a Saturn V!”

Even for a non-space-geek like me, it was pretty cool.

Next morning, the 1500 was blessedly scheduled before the heat took hold. Since I’m my mother’s daughter when it comes to competitiveness, I had to give myself quite the talking-to, not to hope for a national record in this longer distance either. (After all, she ran a 10:55 last year, and the record is 11:30!)