By Alyson Ward, Staff Writer, Houston Chronicle
Updated May 1, 2013 5:22 p.m.

On a rainy evening, some 30 women are circling the half-mile track in Shady Lane Park. Some have jogged ahead; others walk in clusters, chatting as Theresa Strong runs up behind them, her shoes sloshing through wet grass.

“OK, is anybody strolling up there? ‘Cause if you’re strolling. …”

Strong, 53, is the reason they’re on this track, dodging puddles and training for a 5K.

“You don’t have to sign up,” she told them the week before, when she showed up at their residential treatment center for drug and alcohol abuse. “It’s really good for you, and it will change your life, but you don’t have to do it.”

The women on the track want to do it.

They live at Santa Maria Hostel, and they all have goals: to beat their addictions, get an education, find a job, have their children back in their lives. They’re trying to get to a better place in their lives, and Strong – this woman in damp shoes and a sweatshirt – wants to show them how to walk there.

“We’re here to offer you a taste of success,” Strong told the group that first day. “But there is a cost … and it’s a really significant cost. That cost is making a commitment.”

The women commit to meet twice a week to walk or run, extending the distance around the Shady Lane track by one lap each time. In the eight-week program, they also will endure a boot-camp class, receive weekly nutrition lessons from University of Houston dietitians and experience the soothing powers of yoga and massage. At the end, they’ll lace up their shoes and run the Impact a Hero 5K on May 18.

They are the 13th group Strong has trained since she founded the program three years ago.

In 2009, Strong lost her husband to brain cancer. Within a few months she lost her job, too, when the venture capital company she worked for went out of business.

“I decided that was a really good time to make significant changes in my life,” she said.

She decided to throw her energy into something that would let her share her love of running and help people at the same time. She’d read studies that showed exercise can help reduce stress, build self-confidence and help prevent relapse among people in addiction recovery.

She created a nonprofit program and named it Bel Inizio, Italian for “beautiful beginning.”

It’s become a way of life, these 5K training sessions. Strong fits in her own workouts at 5:30 a.m., then works at her day job as advancement director at St. Catherine’s Montessori School. Four evenings a week, she meets with women at Santa Maria or at Gracewood, a transitional housing program for single moms and their children.

She’s assisted by a team of volunteers. Some are in recovery themselves; others simply want to share their love for running and exercise. At Sunday-night workouts, Strong’s 80-year-old mother joins the group.

Andy Stewart, owner of Finish Line Sports in Sugar Land, has served as a volunteer coach. His store also has helped fund the group and provides them new athletic shoes at a deep discount. He has watched how Strong treats the Bel Inizio women with equal parts firmness and respect.

“She’s not necessarily super-outgoing,” Stewart said. “It’s just something she is determined about, and so she gets up there.”

And Stewart has seen how the women respond when they’re given new shoes and a group T-shirt. It’s a sort of confused pleasure, he said, “that someone who is a complete stranger is in their corner.”

Strong has always felt the responsibility to care for others. When she and her siblings were kids, the family volunteered together – “Every Thanksgiving we were at soup kitchens.” Those experiences were a quiet message that other people mattered, no matter what they had or didn’t have.

Today, Strong uses quiet messages to communicate.

Serving fresh fruit after each workout is a way of “planting the seed that a reward is not necessarily M&Ms,” as she puts it.

Bringing in a massage therapist shows the women “how much they individually matter.”

And twice a week, Strong and her volunteers drive to northeast Houston in rush-hour traffic, showing each time that the Bel Inizio women are important to them.

Feeling the benefits

“When you get to the end, to the finish line, it’s a fantastic feeling,” said Cheryl Dawn Jett, 51.

Jett, who served in the Navy, was in Santa Maria’s program for homeless veterans in the summer of 2011. She learned how to stretch and how to exercise without hurting arthritic knees. She loved the intensity of the boot-camp workouts.

Jett walked that first 5K in the heat of August. “I lost a lot of weight and cleared out a lot of toxins,” she said. She went through Bel Inizio’s graduation, then returned to go through the training three more times, even after she moved out of Santa Maria and got her own apartment.

“It really does change your life,” she said. “Especially for ladies who are in recovery and have done a lot of damage to their bodies. … It works from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.”

Strong remembers a race in downtown Houston a couple of years ago. She was running with a Bel Inizio participant, and they were close to the finish line.

“She was doing great, and we were coming to downtown. We were very close to the finish line, and she comes to a dead stop. And she starts crying.”

Strong urged the woman to keep running. The woman wouldn’t move.

“She said, ‘No, you don’t get it. I’ve never finished anything. I didn’t finish high school, I lost my husband, I’ve lost my children, I have no friends, I can’t stay sober. I have never finished anything. And I’m going to finish this.’ ”

Strong stood there and cried with her.

“I still get goose bumps thinking about it. Because this was pivotal for her. She finished something. And no one can ever, ever take that away from her.”