GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — If you ask Principal Tanya Fenner, she’d say Kathy Waldron is quite the character around Sullivan Elementary School in Green Bay.
“Kathy is our little ball of positive energy,” Fenner said Thursday. “She is always bouncing around the school, always has a smile on her face.”
However there’s a lot more to her than meets the eye. This school Janitor is the only woman in Wisconsin to have run the Boston Marathon more than 25 times. In fact, she’s run it 30 times.
“I never thought I’d get to that many, but I feel like there’s a reason,” said Waldron.
This weekend, she’s making it 31–coincidentally, that’s the age she started running it. Her dream, however, started years before.
“The first time I knew I wanted to run was when I was five…I asked my dad if he thought I could ever do it one day,” Waldron recalled. “He said ‘yes, I believe you can’.”
Thursday, her co-workers at Sullivan Elementary School planned a bit of a surprise to mark the occasion. It started with an innocuous call on the PA.
“Kathy Waldron, please come to the office. Thank you!”
That’s where her coworkers presented her with a lovely gift basket as a nice send off. She was thrilled, of course.
“This is amazing! It’s just little old me. I don’t deserve this,” Waldron said in the moment.
“But you do, Kathy. You do deserve it for all you do every day,” Fenner retorted.
But Miss Kathy, as the kids call her, hadn’t seen her real surprise yet.
“The kids wanted to show their love and support for you too…so we’re going to do a little tour throughout the school,” Fenner said.
Miss Kathy stepped out into the hall and rounded a corner that, just moments prior, was empty… But it wasn’t empty anymore.
Instead hundreds of students lined the hallf, clutching signs ranging from “Go Miss Kathy” to “you can do it” to “this is a lot of work for a banana”–that’s what they give you at the end of the race–an overwhelmed Miss Kathy made her way through the hall, rounding the corner, only to be greeted with yet another hallway totally packed with cheering, sign-waving fans. But then they brought her upstairs! Where even more kids awaited her, lining the walls with well-wishes and cheers. The entire student body–over 600 kids, participated in the surprise.
The most surprising part? She didn’t expect a thing. 600 elementary school kids managed to keep a secret–perhaps a record all its own.
“I kept asking the teachers in the hall afterwards, ‘why didn’t someone tip me off?’ Nobody did!” said Waldron. “I’m just so shaky and sweaty right now. Not from running, but from all the good excitement! I’m just blown away right now.”
Indeed, there’s no question that the coworkers and students that love her have her back as she boards a train to Boston this weekend. But she feels support from elsewhere as well–she says she still thinks of her late father, the man who inspired her to run in the first place. He died a year after she ran her first marathon.
“He would say [right now], ‘I know you could do this’,” Waldron told reporters. “That’s what he’d say…’I knew you could.’”
Waldron has no plans to quit anytime soon. She’s dealt with adversity before, but pouring rain hasn’t made her quit. Scorching heat hasn’t made her quit. Blowing winds haven’t made her quit. Not even the horrible 2013 terrorist attack, in which two bombs were detonated near the finish line, could persuade Miss Kathy to throw in the towel.
“All of us runners were thinking, ‘there’s nothing that will keep us away now’,” she recalled. “We wanted to come back even more. I don’t ever want to have to stop.”
While she’s getting ready to run her 31st marathon, you can place a safe bet that there will be a 32nd.
“As I’m aging, I get slower ever time, but with every one that passes, I’m just so grateful that I can do it.”
