Army spouse Corrie Reeter is training for Pikes Peak Ascent, a 13.3-mile race with more than 7,800 feet of elevation gain from the base of Pikes Peak in Manitou, Colorado, to the mountain’s summit. Meanwhile, her logistics officer husband is deployed and likely will be until after the September race. That means intense training while solo parenting their two young boys.
Reeter says she’s up for the challenge and hopes to encourage fellow military spouses to take on their own challenges.
“You can pursue things while your spouse is in the military.”
Reeter and her husband were already married when he joined the Army in 2017.
“It was definitely a team decision,” Reeter said. “We decided together it would be a good fit for our family.”
They’re currently stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.
“This is a dream duty station, and our bucket list is still very long, which is why we’re hoping to stay a bit longer,” she said.
You might recognize Reeter from Instagram, where her handle is @ajoyfulmilspouse. With more than 21,000 followers, she encourages fellow military spouses to “find joy in the uncontrollable,” as her profile says. But the focus was on running when she started her public account a decade ago.
“My Instagram has been many things,” she said. “It was originally a running-gram, back when I was first trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon in 2015.”
Reeter, who has a degree in kinesiology and is a certified personal trainer, has completed five marathons and several other races. Three years ago, she consciously chose to shift her content toward focusing on life as a military spouse.
“We were at a captain’s career course, and I felt like the military presence online was mostly negative,” she said. “I saw a few accounts where people were trying to highlight some of the really great things about military life, but it wasn’t as common.”
Reeter started sharing about the positive ways the military had impacted her family and things like military spouse perks.
“People responded well to it,” she said. “There are hard things that come with this life, but there are really great, beautiful parts of it, as well.”
Still, running has always remained a part of her content, she says, “it’s part of me; it’s something I’ve been doing for a long time.”
While Reeter says she fell short of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, she was able to run the race last year through a charity spot with the USO.
“It was a dream come true, and it was like, two worlds colliding because obviously, running Boston was always a goal of mine, and this was an organization I felt passionate about supporting because of their mission,” she said.
Reeter sees parallels between the challenges of military life and running a marathon.
“You know, I may not have control over when the military sends my husband on deployment or where they send us for our next move, but I do get to control my heart and my attitude. It’s like you wake up for a race and it’s windy, it’s cold, it’s rainy, it’s all the things. But to have the mental fortitude to say, ‘I don’t get to control that, but I do get to control my attitude as I take each step of this run,’ that’s something.”
Recently, Reeter started a new Instagram account, @mileswithmilsos, a virtual run club for military spouses. Not only does she post inspirational content, encouraging members to get out and run, but the goal is to connect with local meetups and running groups at military installations across the country.
“People had been asking me for advice on running and training, so with my background as a personal trainer and my degree in kinesiology, I do some of that, but the idea is also to help people find running partners and create a community,” she said. “We have a great group here in Colorado Springs that has met up to run quite a few times, and that’s been really fun. My hope is to build on that.”
For more information on Reeter’s virtual running club for military spouses, follow @ajoyfulmilspouse and @mileswithmilsos on Instagram.
