Richardson gets along swimmingly

Copperopolis resident Marilyn Richardson (above and left) has spent her life running, cycling and swimming. Amy Alonzo Rozak/Union Democrat, copyright 2012

Richardson, 62, of Copperopolis, spent a great deal of her life as a runner, dabbled in cycling and for more than six years, swam with Tuolumne County Aquatics Masters in Sonora.

When she met her late husband, Ed Friel, it helped her get going. Friel bought a pair of shoes that were too small and gave them to her while she worked as a school librarian in Vail, Colo.    

They ran together and started the Copper Run in Copperopolis, an event that now bears his name.    

The 20th annual Ed Friel Memorial Copper Run, with a 10K, 2-mile and a children’s half-mile event, is scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 28.    

The Sacramento Zoo Zoom inspired the children’s event, Richardson said.    

“The kids are so cute, so I wanted to have that,” she said.   

Beyond that, she said it felt important to give back to the sport of running and provide Calaveras County residents an opportunity to compete on their own turf.    

“It’s such a beautiful place to run,” Richardson said.    

She joined Friel in the pool beginning in 2005 and continued after he died in October 2010.    

From humble beginnings in the water, Richardson learned to thrive.    

“I was not comfortable in the pool,” she said. “In the beginning, I was petrified.”    

She took the “Masters 101” class twice before she felt any ease in the pool.     

Richardson worked her way up to enduring 1,650-meter swims and thrived socially as well as physically with the club.    

“Marilyn’s made incredible improvement ... now swimming long distance,” said TCA Masters head coach Patti Scott-Baier. “She always helps with any of the activities we have.”    

That means anything from baking cakes to grabbing a stopwatch and timing swimmers as they work on pacing themselves through long swims, or encouraging those who are battling fatigue to endure from a nearby perch on the pool deck.    

“She has a really nice personality so she makes people feel really good about what they’re doing,” Scott-Baier said.    

Her fellow TCA swimmers have come to know and love Richardson’s ducks. She fields a lot of inquiries about them if she forgets to bring them to the pool.   

The ducks, she said, were inspired by a ritual her son Daniel, 20, developed when he swam as a freshman and sophomore at Bret Harte High School.    

“He would put a yellow (rubber) duck on the blocks on occasion,” Richardson said. “I liked that so somewhere along the line, I got a little yellow duck.”    

She started to use them to count laps, turning a rubber duck each time she reached the edge of the pool. Friends and other swimmers started to give her ducks. She got a Marine duck after Daniel joined the Marine Corps Reserves.    

“As long as they don’t become a nuisance, the coach allows them,” she said.    

Richardson also takes the opportunity to transport interlibrary loan books that funnel to and from Calaveras County through the Tuolumne County Library in Sonora. It is only a mile out of the way of her thrice-weekly trips to the pool at Sonora Sports and Fitness Center, where the TCA Masters train.    

It is just a small part of the major involvement Richardson has had with the library system, serving as president of the Friends of the Copperopolis Library.     

She holds a master’s degree in library science and found after four years of working as a librarian that it did not fit her as a career. Nevertheless, she believes strongly that “libraries and literacy make a difference in our lives.”    

“You feed a person and the food is gone, but books last,” Richardson said. “If a person can read, they have a chance to make a difference.”   

She joined Friends after feeling she lost the pulse of the community where she has lived since April 1983. Her career with the U.S. Postal Service included nine years as the town’s postmaster, but the population in Copperopolis tripled during the six and a half years she was the postmaster for Avery, Richardson said.   

“Nobody knew who I was anymore,” she said. “At that point, I decided I needed to get out in the community more.”    

This year, Richardson is the president of the Copperopolis Lions Club, having previously been vice president. Her volunteerism is something she learned from her mother, who did 4-H and Sunday school when Richardson was young.    

“I’m very fortunate,” she said. “I just think that if you have something you can give, that you should.”   

Richardson also has a place in the community life of Tuolumne County outside of the pool.    

She is one of the “Sunshine Ladies” group at the Jamestown United Methodist Church that puts on a soup and pie sale President’s Day weekend and a holiday bazaar in November or December. Proceeds help support Interfaith Community Social Services and the Amador-Tuolumne Community Action Agency, she said.