The couple that runs together ...

The backyard lawn is lush and green, surrounded by blue hydrangeas in the garden and trees near the end of the property line.

Even when they’re home, Jon and Kristi Houk enjoy being surrounded by peaceful serenity.

After all, it’s one of the few times the Port Orchard couple isn’t on the run.

Last month, Kristi outlasted Laura Turner to win the women’s division of the 12-kilometer Sound to Narrows race in Tacoma. The 25-year-old won the race in 47 minutes, 2 seconds to outlast Turner, 29, who finished in 47:38. Turner set the course record in 2005.

Despite her success in that run — she finished second in the women’s division in 2008 — Kristi admits she doesn’t enjoy Sound to Narrows.

“That one is really hilly,” she said. “It’s pretty miserable. The whole time I just wanted to stop.”

She actually finished with a worse time than her 46:36 mark in 2008, which she attributes to Bremerton’s Sarna Becker not competing. Becker won the previous three Sound to Narrows races.

“I thought maybe I actually can win this thing,” she said.

It wasn’t the last significant run of the season for the substitute teacher in the South Kitsap School District. On July 4, she competed in the 10-kilometer Peachtree Race in Atlanta.

“That was really hard because it was three miles downhill ... and then three miles uphill,” she said. “It was really hot and humid.”

Kristi said she participated in that event because her performance in Spokane’s Bloomsday Run qualified her for an all-expenses-paid trip to Georgia. She said she stayed in a first-class resort, and was treated like an Olympian.

“Elite athletes have it made,” she said. “It was great.”

Both agree that Kristi is the more serious runner of the two. As a student at Kennewick’s Southridge High School, Kristi Dickey was involved with the school’s marching band, and while she participated in both cross country and track, she admitted she wasn’t as serious about it.

She even contemplated giving up running when she fell short of earning a state berth as a senior, but her parents encouraged her to keep running. Kristi said she visited some top track schools, including the University of Oregon, but was advised to compete at a smaller school more commiserate with her skills.

She settled on Whitworth University, where she met Jon, now 28, on the cross-country team.

Jon, who attended Spokane’s Mead High, always had been active as a youth. He delivered Spokane’s daily newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, for several years and decided to become involved with sports when he entered junior high.

“I noticed a lot of popular kids were the ones that did sports,” he said. “I always was kind of shy and quiet. I decided to do sports because I thought maybe I would be a little more popular and social.”

With no football program offered for seventh-graders, he decided to try cross country. It was the same scenario during the spring for Jon, who played baseball basically from the time he could hold a bat. But without a baseball team, he ran track.

He has competed in both cross country and track events every year since high school and he and Kristi, whom he married in 2007, are serious enough that they are involved with Club Northwest, a Seattle area running team.

Kristi said one challenge with running is the expense. Registration fees, coupled with gas mileage, mean the couple have to be selective about which events they compete in. Jon, who works at Gregg’s Cycles in Seattle, doesn’t run in as many because of his job.

But the couple still work out regularly together, which includes running the trails of Banner Forest.

“With my wife being really fast, it’s nice to go run with her,” Jon said. “I can still run with her and get a really great workout. It’s really nice to be sharing something like that.”

When they aren’t running, gardening or cooking together, they might be spending time with their eight animals. Jon said he didn’t have any animals before he taught biology at Cedar Heights Junior High. Because of students who no longer wanted their animals and the temptations of advertisements on Craigslist, they now have two Italian greyhounds, a pair of snakes and boa constrictors, in addition to two bearded dragons and sugar gliders.

As for children, They probably will wait until later.

For now, there’s more running to come.

“It’s fun to get excited about the same things,” Kristi said. “There’s no conflict of interest here.”

Contact Port Orchard Independent Staff writer Chris Chancellor at cchancellor@portorchardindependent.com or (360) 876-4414.

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