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By Joanna Harper
 Wendy Terris might be the most impressively athletic woman that I know. With her small but muscular body, she stands out at any race. Other women runners speak of her abs with great reverence. Not only does she look the part, but Wendy also has excelled at a great number of sports. Let me tell you about her.
Wendy was born in Portland and grew up in the working class suburb of Gresham. She was always an athlete and competed in soccer, softball, basketball, swimming, gymnastics and track and field when she was young. She found her greatest early success as soccer goalkeeper.
She played both club and high school soccer. At the club level she played on the Oregon Selects team and was the team MVP her senior year of high school. In the high school ranks, she made the all conference team four years running.
Wendy Terris. After high school, she continued her play for Willamette University in Salem Oregon for two years and set a record for the most shutouts in one year. Despite her success on the pitch, soccer was soon to give way for track and field.
Wendy was a one woman track team at Willamette. Wendy competed in the heptathlon, in which the athlete runs the hurdles, 200 and 800 meter races, does the high and long jump and throws the javelin and shot. And even that wasn’t enough for her. She also did the 400 meter hurdles and the triple jump, as well as logging relay duty at both the 4X100 meter and 4X400 meter events.
If you’ve ever watched the heptathlon, the women who usually excel at the event are tall, rangy women. At 5’3” and carrying about 130 pounds at the time, Wendy would have stuck out like a sore thumb. She is proud of the fact that she managed to scale 5’1” in the high jump despite her stature.
As if playing soccer and running track weren’t enough for one collegiate athlete to juggle, Wendy also started to do bodybuilding at the same time. A friend of hers was impressed by seeing her in the weight room, and suggested she might want to try to enter a show or two. Wendy has always been willing to try to new sports and this was no exception.
While I have never seen Wendy lift, I have seen her weight room at her home in Milwaukie, Oregon, another Portland suburb. One look at the weights she lifts made me blanch, and I recalled with horror that Wendy had also seen the very girly set of weights in my basement. It’s just one more way in which I’ll never measure up to her.
In 1997, not too long after she graduated, Wendy took a job coaching track at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia. Wendy had always done some distance running for conditioning, but only now did she start to take the sport seriously. A friend talked her into to training for a marathon, and she ran Chicago in 1999 in 3:02:59.
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It was through Marathon running that Wendy met the love of her life. While competing in the 2003 San Antonio Marathon she was passed by Dave Terris who was running in the relay. After the race they struck up a conversation and sparks flew. Dave is also muscular for a runner and there certainly had to be a lot of chemistry going on.
In fact there was more than just chemistry as love blossomed quickly. Later that same year, Wendy moved to San Antonio to be with Dave and they got married in November of 2004. They also didn’t waste any time starting a family, as their son Sebastian soon followed.
That Wendy would train and race through pregnancy is a given, but it is worth noting that she notched some impressive races while carrying her son. She won a 30K road race when she was more than 7 months into her term and later won a 4 mile race, in 24:30, just eight days before giving birth. She was back running a mere two weeks postpartum and won another 30K race 6 weeks after Sebastian first saw the light of day.
Wendy and Dave moved to Portland in February 2006 so that they would have better family support for their son. Wendy says that Sebastian has made her a better person but he has also complicated their running schedules. Dave runs early before work and Wendy runs after work and that way they can still train while still maintaining their parental responsibilities. Wendy ran with Sebastian in a baby jogger until the end of 2006, but had to give it up when her son wanted to get out of the thing and run with her.
After they moved to town, Dave and Wendy became fixtures in the local running scene. I vividly recall the day Wendy placed second at the Flat Marathon, which is held on Sauvie’s Island just outside of Portland on the 4th of July. And when I mean she placed second, I don’t mean that she was the second woman that day. In fact she beat the second place woman by 40 minutes.
Wendy was the second runner overall to finish that race in 2006 and her 2:44 in July impressed me a lot. But I might have been more impressed by what I saw at our club picnic after the race. There was Wendy playing soccer with Sebastian and not looking particularly heavy legged. It would not have surprised me if she had gone out for another run later that day.
During this period of time, Wendy became well known for her ability to race well and frequently over the marathon distance. She once ran 18 marathons in 18 months. In 2008 she gathered a certain amount of national notoriety for running the Olympic marathon trials and the Boston marathon on successive days. Neither race was overly fast by her standards but she still averaged less than 3 hours for back to back marathons.
In 2008 I had the opportunity to be teammate of Dave and Wendy for the annual madness that is the Hood to Coast relay. Wendy was the fastest woman on our coed team but the real drama for our team surrounded Dave. It wasn’t certain that he would be able to run his 3rd leg, but he wound up not just running it, but running well, and we celebrated a division win that day.
However, even Wendy is not impervious to injury. Eventually all of the training and racing was bound to catch up with her. In the fall of 2009, shortly after her 40th birthday, she began to have some serious back and leg issues. She continued to run through these problems for the next few months, but even she has her limits. In June 2010 she took two months off of running and swam instead. Starting back was slow and painful, but eventually she came around.
By spring of 2011 she was back and better than ever. She ran a PR of 29:04 at the Red Lizard 5 mile race over Memorial weekend in the midst of training for Grandmas Marathon. At the June race she ran another PR and world class effort of 2:40:24 for 2nd place among all master’s women and first among Americans. It is very impressive to run a marathon PR more than 10 years and 50 marathons since her first one.
Her current training sees her logging 75-85 miles per week, including speed work on Tuesdays, a trail run with hills on Thursdays and a long hard effort on Saturday. She supplements her running with weight training on two mornings per week. She has now decided to run fewer marathons than she did before and plans to emphasize quality over quantity. Wendy is proud to a member of the Brooks ID team.
She is planning on returning to Twin cities in October and then heading to Houston for the trials in January. While she has no illusions of making the team, she does hope to be among the first master’s runners to finish. Instead of racing the next day, the Terris family will be taking a cruise. It should provide a nice break for someone who has been known to work too hard.
But don’t look for her to be slacking off for too long. She has plans for plenty of other races and may even tackle her first 50 miler in 2012. And if you see her at the races, just check out those amazing abs of hers.
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Wendy, the person
Although I don't know Wendy well, she is always warm and friendly at races. I run and place behind her- proud of myself if I can even spot the back of ...
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