88-year-old woman legs out a 10,000-mile labor of love

She didn’t look like a woman who’d walked 10,000 miles.

Dressed in red ball cap, red earrings, red striped shirt, red lipstick and pink Nikes, the rosy-cheeked 88-year-old charged across the crepe-paper finish line Saturday.

It was a goal 11 years in the making for Martha Michel.

She could have walked across the United States three times or to Paris, France, and back.

Instead, she did the 10,000 miles in laps around the lake at Namasté Alzheimer Center.

It was a labor of love for her late husband, Lester. “We walked around here many times together,” she said.

The great-grandma led the pack of family members and friends to Saturday’s milestone.

She started the walks when Lester was a Namasté patient in 1995. It was a way for the couple to continue to enjoy the outdoors. In better days, Lester had climbed every Fourteener in Colorado; she conquered 32 of the peaks with him.

“He died at age 79 years, 8 months and 16 days,” she said. “We had been married 56 years and 20 days.”

She kept the lake laps going after his death in 1998, keeping tabs with a wrist golf counter and meticulous records on a calendar. Five laps is a mile.

“Whether it’s raining, snowing, sunshine in 100 degree heat, Martha is out with her red umbrella and jacket, doing her 15 laps a day,” Namasté administrator Janice Fisher said.

This despite a screw and 9-inch pin in the ankle Martha broke when she chased a deer out of her garden.
The walks were a connection to Lester, a chemistry professor at Colorado College for 36 years.

“Alzheimer’s affected his speech early on. He didn’t talk except on rare occasions,” Martha said.
The last time Lester spoke to her was by the lake.

“He was pretty far along with the Alzheimer’s,” she said. “His arms just hung down and his face was just expressionless. We stopped over on the other side and he said to me, ‘I want to hold you.’ And I picked up his arms and put them around me.”

Even with 50,000 laps under her feet, she plans to keep on trucking. She thinks all ages should follow suit.

“Tell your children to stay active and don’t become couch potatoes,” she said.