121: Pam Reed – The Desert Ultrarunning Legend

By Davy Crockett
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Pam Reed, age 61 in 2022, from Jackson Wyoming, and Scottsdale, Arizona, is a 2022 inductee in the American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame, its 21st member. Over the years she has been a prolific, successful runner, especially in desert races in the western United States.

Leonard Peterson

Pam (Saari) Reed (1961-) grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in the small mining town of Palmer. She is the daughter of Roy E. Saari (1932-2018) and Karen H. Peterson (1935-2014). Her father worked at an enormous open pit iron mine in town and was always on the go. Her mother was a nurse who instilled in her daughters “the values of initiative and assertiveness,” and was active in outdoor sports such as snowmobiling and cross-country skiing.

Pam has Scandinavian ancestry: Finish on her father’s side, Norwegian and Swedish on her mother’s side. Her grandfather Leonard D. Peterson (1895-1972) was a man of determination who worked two full-time jobs, for the railroad and the Chicago Transit System. Once he walked all the way from Merrill, Wisconsin to Chicago, about 300 miles.



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Early Years

As a youngster, Pam, with her competitive nature, would enjoy challenging the boys in races and games. She had dreams of competing in the Olympics in gymnastics, but she became better at tennis. At the age of fifteen, she started running to get into shape for tennis

Pam attended Negaunee High School, about ten miles away, and was very active in sports and activities including track, tennis, gymnastics, cheerleading and choir. On the high school track team, she didn’t like the long three-mile runs because they were boring, and she would lead her friends cross-country across backyards to cut down the distance.

Suicide Ski Jump

Negaunee is the home of the Suicide Ski Jump facility and a luge track. Winter sports were an important part of the region where Pam grew up, although she didn’t especially enjoy skiing, because she didn’t like the cold. She remembered, “I grew up skiing. My dad would take me skiing and I didn’t like going. I was five years old and there was tons of really heavy snow, and I broke my leg.”  She didn’t know it then, but she was destined for the desert.

Hard work was in her blood. She said, “Physical toughness was a strong point in my family, and maybe in the Upper Peninsula as a whole. It was cultivated and bred into us over many generations, so it came easily to us. It was expected of us, and it was what we expected of ourselves.”

For college, Pam attended Michigan Tech in the remote town of Houghton, Michigan, about 90 miles away, where she continued to compete in tennis and excelled. She majored in Business and later transferred to Northern Michigan University in Marquette.  She soon married her high school boyfriend, Steve Koski. They moved to Tucson, Arizona where Pam transferred to the University of Arizona to complete her college education and she eventually received a Bachelor of Science in Business.

Pam became an aerobics director at a Tucson health club and started to compete in triathlons in 1989 at the age of 28. She also started running marathons. (She would eventually run more than 100 marathons, with 2:59:10 at the 2001 St. George Marathon as her personal best.)

Pam had two young sons, but her marriage to Steve ended in divorce. She soon married Jim Reed, an accountant, who also competed in Ironmans. He also had two sons.

Becoming an Ultrarunner

Bennie Linkhart

In 1991, a friend, Bennie Linkhart (1931-2017), age 60, gave Jim a copy of Ultrarunning Magazine. Bennie was a state weightlifting champion who had taken up running and was training to run Leadville 100. When Jim introduced Pam to Bennie, she thought, “Who in the heck runs 100 miles? No one can do that.”