In March, Rena Elmer watched her daughter Taryn—a freshman at Marcus High School in Flower Mound, Texas—run a personal best 5:15 mile in a downpour.
So when Taryn saw the forecast for Grandma’s Marathon this weekend, she had a message for her mom. “She grabbed my shoulders and said, ‘Mom, you’re going to PR,’” Elmer told Runner’s World by phone on Sunday. “I PRed in the rain—you can PR in the rain, too.”
The elder Elmer, who’s 41, took those words to heart. Despite steady showers, she ran 2:35:45—nearly 5 minutes off her previous personal best—and placed seventh in her third marathon.
The time came as a bit of a shock to Elmer. She hadn’t raced 26.2 miles since the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta, where she ran 2:41:22 to place 53rd. In the two years since, she’s had two more children—Jane, born in January 2021, and Jessica, born in December 2022—to add to her previous nine.
In fact, the only time she’d raced in the past four years was in March. Then, she won the Irving Half Marathon in 1:17:58 to gain entry to the elite field at Grandma’s. Based on that, and the times she’d run in training, she expected to be able to run between 2:40 and 2:42.
But all those paces have come in the brutal Texas heat. And though she uses a pace calculator during training to account for conditions, Saturday’s mid-50s temperatures and tailwind at the start left her feeling better than anticipated. She started the first 5K at 6:12 pace and gradually picked it up from there, latching onto other runners as she went and covering the last 10K at 5:44 pace.
“It was incredible—it felt so good, I just felt so powerful and smooth and strong,” she said. “I just love running for that feeling.”
The sport has long brought Elmer joy and carried her through both triumphs and tragedies. After running in high school in Beaver, Utah, she walked on to the track and cross country teams at Brigham Young University. Her junior year, she placed third in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the 2005 NCAA outdoor championships.
She kept running after graduation, and after narrowly missing in 2008 and 2012, qualified for the 2016 Olympic Track and Field Trials in the steeplechase. There, she made the final and finished 10th.
In between those accomplishments came incredible hardships. She had her first two children—Taryn and her twin brother, Talon—in 2009, and Elmer developed serious complications afterward. And in 2015, two more children later, an abusive situation involving her now ex-husband broke her family apart.
But her sport—and her faith—carried her through. In January 2017, she met Will Elmer, who also had four children. They married and joined their families, and since then have had three more kids.
Elmer switched to the marathon in 2019, and ran 2:40:21 in her debut at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon to qualify for the Trials.
She considered trying to do so again in 2024, but her pregnancies and all the older kids’ activities made the timing difficult. But the qualifying time of 2:37 was in the back of her mind, and beating it now brings her immense satisfaction. “I proved to myself that I could’ve made that Olympic Trials race in Florida,” she said.
To get there, she bought an online training plan from Northern Arizona Elite, which took her up to a max of just over 60 miles per week. She logs most of them early in the morning, alone, before the older kids go to school or religious classes. If she hears the baby cry, she’ll pack up the younger kids and take them to the gym, where they can stay in childcare and she can hit the treadmill.
On race day, all 11 kids were with her in Duluth in spirit—Will had written their names on her fluid bottles. But physically, they stayed in Texas with Will’s parents, watching the race on TV.
Will and Rena boarded a plane back immediately after the race, arriving home at around midnight to find a banner they’d made congratulating her. They drew pictures of her crossing the finish line, signed their names, and made an acronym with hers (Runner; Excellent; Never Gives Up; Awesome).
And though she predicted the outcome, Taryn was impressed: “Mom, you ran amazing. You ran so fast,” she told Elmer.
Elmer isn’t sure what’s next, racing-wise. She’d like to do the Boston Marathon sometime, and also hasn’t ruled out trying to qualify for the Trials again in 2028, though the standards for doing so haven’t yet been announced.
But she knows that no matter what, she’ll keep training.
“Running isn’t my whole world—but I can do this and then go home to my kids. It’s so rewarding,” Elmer said. “It’s just a special thing when you can have the best of both worlds.”
Cindy is a freelance health and fitness writer, author, and podcaster who’s contributed regularly to Runner’s World since 2013. She’s the coauthor of both Breakthrough Women’s Running: Dream Big and Train Smart and Rebound: Train Your Mind to Bounce Back Stronger from Sports Injuries, a book about the psychology of sports injury from Bloomsbury Sport. Cindy specializes in covering injury prevention and recovery, everyday athletes accomplishing extraordinary things, and the active community in her beloved Chicago, where winter forges deep bonds between those brave enough to train through it.
