Marny has become accustomed to breaking barriers in her life. The sound barrier, the glass ceiling. In 1969, she married her high school sweetheart after his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy. They moved to Florida for his flight training and she found her second love: flying. She’d watch planes taking off and would dream of piloting them while she finished her English degree at the University of West Florida.

But she didn’t just dream of flying. She worked for it to become reality, saving her pay from writing ad copy at a local radio station in Meridian, Mississippi. It was one of the few jobs she could get then. “Employers tended to discriminate against Navy wives because they moved around a lot,” she says.

After relocating to the Washington, D.C. area, she paid for flight lessons with her hard-won copywriting pay. Ground school, practice take-offs and landings, solo flights. Then, one of the biggest tests of all: flying solo cross-country by herself four times, Chesapeake Bay to Delaware. On that first cross-country flight, it was a beautiful day. “I was flying over the water, and I could see the birds soaring with me over the shoreline. It was a feeling of freedom and exhilaration unlike any I had ever felt before.”

Sea to shining sea

Marny got her pilot’s license in 1981. Along the way, she built an unusual career for a former English major. She did oceanographic research at the Naval Research Lab in Maryland, using computers to analyze ice age data obtained from deep-sea sediment cores. Her data crunching helped scientists there make major breakthroughs in climatology.

Her next port of call: Capitol Hill, where she helped computerize the voting system in the House of Representatives, and then to standardize computer systems in the House. This is also where Marny met her present husband, C.W. Gilluly, a former naval aviator who flew 151 combat missions during the Vietnam War.

Since then, she’s served in volunteer leadership roles at the national level for Alpha Chi Omega, the National Panhellenic Conference, the University of West Florida Board of Trustees, and the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem.

And she’s dealt with extreme loss and adversity along the way, losing her sister, mother and father within the span of three years. She started running when her sister died, and since then she’s run 15 marathons. She was sponsored by Reebok, took sixth place in the master’s division of the Boston Marathon and seventh in New York City, and she was the only American running in the St. Petersburg, Russia Marathon in 1990, before the Berlin Wall fell.