Peak Performance 82-Year-Old Grandmother Joins Family For Trek To Benefit Heart Insitute
Most people relish showing visitors the view from Mount Spokane.
Mary Breshears’ family expects her to climb to it.
Today, Breshears, 82, of Santa Rosa, Calif., will lace her sneakers - “I can’t even call them tennis shoes” - and stride four miles to the summit.
Her daughter, Carole Parker, a cardiac technologist, thought the Heart Institute’s Climb Mount Spokane would be the perfect outing for her mother’s fall visit.
In a family whose home videos feature Mom doing handstands on a diving board at age 77, this should be a walk in the park.
“My mother is amazing,” says Parker, who will accompany Breshears on today’s climb for the Northwest Pediatric Research Project. Breshears is the walk’s oldest registrant and comes the farthest distance.
The climb, expected to attract 900 people, will raise money to research the genetic and lifestyle influences on 40 area children ages 8 to 12.
It’s a benefit for young hearts, apparently by young hearts.
As the widowed mother of five, Breshears didn’t begin college until 46 and teaching at almost 50. She took up golf in her 50s (learning from a book propped on the ground), water skiing in her 60s, and had her most serious skiing injury, a twisted knee, at 73. She quit smoking at 80.
She still reads for the blind, transports cancer patients to appointments and walks 50 minutes a day. She has been known to pay grandchildren a quarter to dive off the top deck of a houseboat.
“Head first,” Breshears says. “I never go in feet first.”
“My mother never sat on the porch while the kids played, she always got off the porch and joined them,” Parker says.
On her 80 birthday, her children, 16 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren presented Gigi (Great-grandma) with an armload of pink, red and white roses.
“We are,” Breshears always says, “a family of late bloomers.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Molly Quinn
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HIKE The Mount Spokane walkathon begins at Selkirk Lodge at 8 a.m. today. Cost is $6.