Monday, January 15, 2007

a little history to get us started...

so here it is. the chicago marathon blog. as of now, the team consists of me (res. chicago, il) and callie (res. moscow, id). we've been friends since the first day of 9th grade. a hell of a lot has happened in the 14 years since then. we ran together on high school track and cross country teams. we were part of the first graduating class of eagle high. went away to colleges in different states. i left idaho with plans to never look behind me. i lived in california, england, japan, new york, san francisco, buffalo, boston, and toured half the united states before settling down in chicago. i was callie's maid of honor when she married her sweetheart on a mountain top in idaho. my parents think of callie as their adopted daughter. we've grown into our adult selves, founded careers and relationships, endured successes and failures. but the amazing thing is that we're still friends, and that we're still running.

actually, i took about a 10 year break from running. there was college and all its distractions, then there was a ski accident that left me with an impaired sense of balance and dizzy spells that still linger six years later. there were long, cold winters and day jobs and night jobs and many many good reasons not to run. but somehow last year, i found my way back to running. and i discovered that my identity as a runner wasn't gone, just hibernating. running sustained me thru a very difficult period of my life recently, when i parted with someone very important to me. i really believe that it was divine providence that led me back to running not long before our relationship came to a sudden, staggering end. running gave me strength, physically and mentally at a time when i felt utterly emotionally destroyed.

at any rate, running a marathon has been in the back of my mind for almost all of my life. and something tells me that this is my year. so when the calendar rolled over to january 1, i wrote callie and asked her if she'd be interested in training for the chicago marathon. lucky for me, callie is crazy enough to have said yes.

we hope to plan some trips to train together, and to use this blog and email the rest of the time to trade training tips, thoughts, ideas, etc.

here we go! see you october 7...