Marathon agent
Oklahoma Association of Realtors president is in for the long haul
Kathy Fowler’s first full marathon six years ago came with an unpleasant surprise.
“Nobody tells you that at mile 21, the world is going to end, and you’re just going to want to sit down and cry,” she said with a chuckle. “But almost everyone I’ve talked to since then has hit mile 21 in their first marathon. Everybody goes through that.”
That marathon, the Williams Route 66 Marathon near Tulsa, gives runners and walkers a chance to traverse the Mother Road in a way the average driver speeding along cannot.
But the romance quickly burned away for Fowler, and she texted her daughter as she limped along.
“I just can’t finish,” she typed. “My hip hurts, my knee hurts, everything hurts.”
Her daughter, Johanna Fowler, now 23, was quick to respond, pointing out that she had trained too hard to give up. Then her daughter, who had competed in a high school relay event earlier in the day, texted, “Hold on, I’ll come find you.”
Fowler smiled at the memory. “So she came and found me, then ran me in. It was really emotional, a really neat thing.”
Fast-forward a year. The mother-and-daughter duo returned to the Williams Route 66 Marathon. “I was back to salvage myself because I threw a hissy at mile 21,” Fowler said. “So I trained really hard and was really well-prepared.”
Her daughter, on the other hand, hadn’t been training. Her plan was to defer her entry to the next year’s race, but the Route 66 event didn’t allow deferments. So mother and daughter hit the road together.
Fowler texted her daughter after finishing the race.
“She didn’t answer me for a little bit,” she said. “Pretty soon, though, I got this text: ‘Mom, I’m at mile 21. This sucks, I should have trained. I don’t know what I was thinking.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know but you can’t quit. You cannot quit.’ ”
In that moment, the roles reversed. “I went back, got her and brought her in,” Fowler said.
‘Do good things’
Someone with enough imagination might be able to draw a parallel between those raw moments of hand-in-hand support and the work that lays ahead for Fowler, who is the Oklahoma Association of Realtors’ president for 2018.
Realtors work with both buyers and sellers, addressing everything from the inspection process to down payments and reliable lenders.
“At the end of the day, we want a happy buyer and a happy seller,” Fowler said. “Both of them have the same goal: The seller wants to sell that house, and the buyer wants to buy that house.”
Fowler, 47, grew up in northwest Montana. A firm recruited her for a job with a telecommunications company, bringing her to Enid in 1996. She transitioned into real estate in 2003, and worked in Enid for 12 years before moving to Yukon in 2015.
The move was largely pragmatic. “I wanted to move somewhere closer to an airport,” she said. “I was traveling a lot with the National Association of Realtors, so it was nice to be 20 minutes from the airport.”
In 2016, she moved from one firm to another, joining Coldwell Banker Select, 1700 E State Highway 152 in Mustang, as a broker associate.
As the 2018 state association president, Fowler is emphasizing the theme “Do Good Things.”
“It’s kind of encompassing with everything we do,” she said. “We do good things for our members. We do good things for the public, and Oklahoma also does good things in the National Association of Realtors. We were just recognized this last week as having eight of our local associations that make up the state association in the top 20 percent for advocacy in the country.”
It also means keeping up with the bills slowly churning their way through the state Legislature, a task not for the faint of heart. A committee sifts through proposed bills line by line. Then it tracks them throughout the legislative session.
“We are actually monitoring over 100 bills now,” she said.
But one of Fowler’s goals, once her term is up, is to go back to running. She took up running at age 40.
“I was not going to age gracefully,” she said. “I was going to fight it kicking and screaming.”
But an injury sidelined her last year. Association business is keeping her too busy to seriously get back into running, but she said she looks forward to it.
“It’s just peaceful,” she said. “And probably the nicest thing about it that it‘s a time when I can’t take phone calls and can’t check emails. I can text a little bit, but it’s a bad idea. It’s a time when I can unplug from everything, just let it be me and my dog.”