In her sophomore season that recently ended at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas, cross-country runner Drea Gibson was named first-team all-conference in the Division III American Southwest Conference. At 40. As a wife and mother with four kids. As an exercise physiology major.
And as a veteran of 20 years in the Army, from which she retired last year as a first sergeant following five tours of duty — two each in Iraq and Afghanistan and one in Ukraine. She earned a Combat Action Badge in recognition of fighting enemy forces in ground warfare.
She is even immortalized in a candid photo on a Pentagon wall, fist-bumping an Iraqi boy, as an exemplary of the Defense Department’s soldiers in its Global War on Terror.
At a time when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been removing women from major military roles and stopped the promotion of the first woman to oversee the Navy SEALs, Gibson’s path from decorated soldier to decorated college athlete has resonance. Her experience and perseverance fly in the face of Hegseth’s antiquated and meritless view of women in combat.
As Gibson explained in a phone interview, “As a leader in the Army, a major goal of mine was to ensure that I treated all of my soldiers equally in that none of them would be treated as I was treated for being a female in an all-male unit.”
Sadly, that is what inspired her to become a dedicated runner — or, more accurately, impelled her to do so.
The Sports Moment newsletter: Reporter Ava Wallace takes you through the buzziest, most engaging sports stories of the week. Sign up for the weekly newsletterhttps://t.co/WmrlnLPBpp
— Post Sports (@PostSports) October 16, 2025
She felt a calling to the military after 9/11 while in high school in Canton, Ohio. After enlisting and training, she was made a counterintelligence agent — one of those soldiers sent into the theater of war to collect information on the ground.
And she was always the lone woman. First in Afghanistan, where she got smoked — that is, purposefully doused with the fine dirt of the Afghan terrain nicknamed “moon dust.” It happened after she showered, which she could do just once per week because there was no shower for women — and only after she would beg another soldier to guard the shower while she was in it. She was 19 or 20.
“They thought it was funny,” Gibson recalled. “It was worse. Being smoked when your hair is wet and your body’s still kind of wet, you’d have been cleaner if you didn’t take a shower.”
And on her first patrols, she was put on the gun — the soldier whose head you see popping out the top of a vehicle. But she wasn’t allowed to handle the weapon.
“I’m supposed to be the gunner with an M4 in the turret or an M16,” she recalled. “It was kind of a joke, kind of part of hazing.”
Because she wasn’t a guy.
So Gibson started to run. Farther and farther. To release her anger and hide her hurt. To get away from her supposed teammates who treated her more like an opponent.
Then came Iraq.
“They said, ‘Because you’re a woman, we don’t want to take you out,’” she recalled. “I went through all the same training that these men went through, while my team at the time was really being run into the ground because I, as a member of the team, couldn’t rotate. I told them, ‘I’ll even take your PT test on a male standard,’ but they said no because they didn’t want me to be a distraction if we were taking lots of fire.”
The PT is the Army’s physical training test. It scores soldiers on deadlifts, hand-release push-ups, speed while carrying weight, a plank and a two-mile run. Hegseth ordered all brass to a meeting in Quantico, Virginia, in September where, among other things, he demanded PT testing be scored on one scale, which would limit women in combat.
Gibson gets it.
“I understand the need for this standard,” she said. “I will never forget how heavy radio batteries, bullets and mortar rounds were on my back after a couple days of carrying them.”
But there’s perniciousness to it, she pointed out.
“I deployed with and operated alongside the infantry, which gave me a convenient advantage to be a woman with combat experience and get promoted,” she said. “I was always fit enough to score the maximum on the female standard without much effort but score average or slightly above average on the male standard. What this would mean now for a female in combat [military occupational specialty] is that she can be the top 1 percent of females in her physical fitness level and still be at a major disadvantage for promotions and schools. Is this fair for that female? Objectively speaking, it doesn’t feel like it.”
But when a young runner who heard Gibson’s story approached her after a conference meet to ask about commissioning in the Army, Gibson said she didn’t dissuade her.
The woman was running in the path that Gibson helped cut — out of joy and not pain. And she proved to have the mettle: She was one of the few women who beat Gibson in conference competition this season.
The post A 40-year-old college sophomore is still running after 20 years in the Army appeared first on Washington Post.
