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Your journey is your own. It’s meant to be different from someone else because we are all unique. Yet we try to make our lives fit into predefined boxes. As part of the running Instagram community we’re putting our lives on display in a 2″x2″ square, often with a pace/distance stamp on it. As humans, we naturally seek satisfaction from those around us. But our greatest satisfaction should not come from the approval of others. We are more than the number of followers we have or the number of likes on a photo. As runners, we measure things in numbers (pace, distance, time, heart rate, etc.), but there is more to this life than running accolades.

I’m writing this from a current place in my own life. Much of my identity has been wrapped up in being a runner, and while I could never envision my life without running, it should not be the only thing defining me. Here is a little bit more into who I am:

I am a Christian. My faith is incredibly important to me and guides many of the decisions that I make and my values. Before many of my races, you might see me saying a quick prayer on the starting line. I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone out on the course or in my life.

I am a wife. My husband and I have been together for nearly 7 years and have been married for 1.5 years. He is my best friend and the most supportive partner I could have ever dreamed of. We met in college and started dating at the beginning of my freshman year. I feel lucky to have met the person I will spend the rest of my life with so young as I know it doesn’t happen very often anymore. He’s my person.

I am very close with my family. Family is extremely important to me and is the reason we moved back from St. Louis after 2 years; it just wasn’t home without our families nearby. I have become very close with my husband’s family as well and we are blessed to have such involved families in our lives.

I am an animal lover. We adopted our rescue dog, Lola, in St. Louis when she was 1.5 years old and had just had a litter of puppies. She is the sweetest girl and the best addition to our family. Growing up we always had a pet at the house and still have 2 family pets at my parents’ house (a cat and a dog). I can’t imagine growing up without a furry friend!

I am an analytics manager by day. Truth be told I’m still trying to figure out what my professional passion is. I have two degrees, one in Marketing and the other in Supply Chain Management and I would really like to move more towards the creative side of things again and get away from the numbers and Excel for a little bit…this keeps me up at night and scares me but I’m thankful to have a steady income while I’m figuring it all out. I am also serving as the Director of Marketing & Social Media for my running club which is a non-profit. I’m not getting paid but it’s the best job I’ve ever had and I wish it could be a full-time gig to be able to devote all my working time and energy to it!

I love to travel and explore new places. During college I spent 3 months in Seattle on an internship and hiked nearly every weekend. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Italy, France, Spain, Malta, Tunisia (Africa), Canada, Mexico, and a few Caribbean islands. I always say that if my family didn’t live in Chicago that we’d be gone in a heartbeat and hopefully be out west. My favorite state in the country is Colorado because there’s something to do year round as an avid skier (I’ve been skiing for almost as long as I could walk…).

I have a few very close friends and many acquaintances. I describe myself as an introverted extrovert. I can easily hold a conversation with a stranger and enjoy company but in small doses. I definitely appreciate my alone time and many times after work I come home and just want to veg on the couch alone for a bit to decompress! My best friends are actually the ones I see the least often as we’re living in different states but no matter how long we’ve been apart a conversation is so natural and picks up where it left off.

Finally, my passion is what drives me. I’ve had a few people recently tell me that I have an athletic gift and I whole-heartedly disagree. I don’t think I have any natural talent; I also don’t mean this in a braggadocios way at all I think I just have a ridiculous amount of drive to constantly improve and better myself which gets applied not only to my running but to nearly every aspect of my life. It’s tiring, and time-consuming, but it is what keeps me going every day (and also leads to having a problem with relaxing…but that’s a story for a different day).

So after all this, I ask you, what have you been letting define who you are lately? How do you want to define yourself? There is so much more to each one of us than just a PR in an Instagram bio or a daily post about our run. All of the things that define me are just as important in my life even if they aren’t being showcased on an Instagram page.

I challenge you to share, who are you #offtherun?

 

It’s about 9 p.m. on Sunday night, the night before I begin marathon training for Berlin, and I can’t help but feel excited. I mean, how cool is it that I get to say I’m training for the Berlin Marathon! It’s been said that you’re not ready to run another marathon until you’ve forgotten your last one and 8 months after a disappointing Chicago Marathon, there’s a fire lit inside me and something feels different going into this training cycle. In my last post, I laid out the big goal I have for myself at Berlin this September, running a 3:25, and since putting it out in the open, there has not been one doubt in my mind that it’s possible. I realize that I’m going to have to work harder and train smarter than I ever have before, and that’s exciting to me. I love the marathon. I love the grind leading up to it, the weekend long runs where I get to run for hours, and the race itself where I get to leave everything out on the course.

Again, something feels different. I feel stronger coming off of two back to back half marathon PRs after nearly 2 years of no PR in the distance. I know a lot of this can be attributed to working with a coach who has been challenging me with different workouts that I haven’t tried before in training. Hitting the hard workouts has given me the confidence that I can do hard things and that this is within the realm of possible. During this training cycle I will hit the most mileage I’ve done in a week before, and that excites me. It will require getting enough sleep each night, eating the right foods to fuel my body, and training smart (aka running those recovery runs slow and leaving the fast running for the days it counts). I’m ready for all of it and excited to push myself hard.

I know it won’t all be easy. We’re in the middle of buying a house which will require moving (luckily just across town), I’m busy at work, I’m on the board for my running club which has been growing rapidly, and I want to make sure I’m putting my family first with a busy schedule. As the miles begin to add up, I’ll have to be more diligent about my schedule, but I chose this and I’m excited to chase another 26.2 again and hopefully walk away with not only a BQ but a big PR!

Chasing Unicorns begins tomorrow! Let’s get after it!

At the end of 2017, I made a lot of personal running goals for the new year, but the biggest one was to make 2018 my best running year yet. That could mean a lot of things, but to me, it meant chasing down PRs in the half marathon and marathon and ultimately punching my ticket to the Boston Marathon. Over the past few months of spring half marathon training, not only did I nab two new big PRs, but something much greater happened – I gained my confidence back. I lined up at the start line for the Carmel Half Marathon knowing that I had put in the work and that a big PR was possible. I lined up at the IL Half curious how much more I could push myself to see what was left in my legs. I hope this newfound confidence carries over to my marathon training that begins on June 4th as I have more big goals for myself.

Since my half marathons, I have begun reevaluating the time goals I set for myself for the Berlin Marathon. Still, my ultimate goal has been making it to the starting line of the Boston Marathon, but to do that with a cushion my goal was a 3:30 with a BQ time of 3:35. Today, I find myself wanting more than just that 3:30 because I’m more confident in myself as a runner and that 3:30 while still a fantastic goal and 8 minutes faster than my current PR of 3:38, might not be pushing myself to my full potential. When I break it down, 3:30 is running two 1:45 half marathons. That used to seem a little daunting to me, but with a current half PR now of 1:36, it seems doable if I put in the work this summer and stay healthy. I started thinking to myself…what is in the realm of possible now and what time would I be happy with? And I keep coming back to the time 3:25. It’s become less and less scary as I’ve thought about it over the last few weeks and writing it down now it sounds pretty darn good. 3:25 equates to a 7:49 pace. I’ve always believed I could run a marathon pace in the 7’s before but when your goal starts becoming closer and closer to reality it can be scary. I was commenting to someone the other day that it’s funny that we pray and pray for things to work out the way we imagine but when they actually start playing out we question, “ok, what’s the catch”, rather than be thankful things are going well.

I know the next 4 months of training are going to be intense and they’re going to push me to both my physical and mental limits but I’m so ready to put in the work and make my dreams come true.

What big goals are you chasing this year? Let me know in the comments below!

December 25, 2018 – Christmas Day but also the beginning of my half marathon training cycle for my target race on March 31^st, the Carmel Half Marathon. I had thought a lot about what plan I would follow this time around after coming off of a disappointing racing year in 2017. I had come within 45 seconds of my half marathon PR (1:41:44) but just wasn’t able to get under that number in the three attempts I made last year (1:42, 1:43, 1:45; ugh). After much debate, I decided to create a hybrid of the Nike Half Marathon training plan and the Hal Higdon Advanced Half Marathon program and began my training. My training cycle was going well, but I finished every workout feeling like I could’ve pushed a little harder, gone a little farther, and wondering if I was training to my full potential. The thought of hiring a running coach had crossed my mind after the Chicago Marathon in 2017 (another disappointing performance), and I started looking into coaches in the area before deciding I could tackle it on my own once again.

Fast forward to January 15, 2018, 3 weeks into my half marathon training cycle. I had been following Jessica Rinehart on Instagram for the past 6 months and had seen many of her athlete’s and her own success in running, including achieving Boston Marathon qualifying times. I started perusing her website and took a leap of faith and contacted her to learn more about her coaching philosophy, share my personal running goals and running history, and see if it would be a good match for a potential coach. I talked to Jessica on the phone for 30 minutes and after the conversation there was no doubt in my mind that it would be a good fit and a good next step for me in my training. Her training philosophy was similar to mine (wanting to run 6 days/week, adding in some strength training which I had been lacking but knew was important, and continuing to build my base mileage to be a stronger athlete by the time I start marathon training again in the Fall). I was ready to pull the trigger and sign up for coaching, but needed the approval from my husband first as we make financial decisions together.

I should not have been surprised at how supportive Ross would be of the idea of hiring a running coach. He has been my biggest supporter since the day we started dating and he’s seen me through the highest highs (setting race PRs) and lowest lows (training my butt off the months leading up to a race and then falling apart the day of) of running. Fortunately, we were able to make the financial commitment to hire a coach and he encouraged me to go for it and see how things went. While it’s only been about 4 weeks since I started training with Jessica, something feels different about this training cycle. I hit 46 miles of running last week and felt like I could have run more; I hadn’t hit 46 miles since marathon training last Fall and here I am running a race half the distance and running more than most of my marathon training weeks last year. I think this is also part of my “success” problem from last year, but I just followed free training plans I could find online, not realizing that every runner is different and responds to mileage differently. Based on how my body is responding to higher mileage weeks and how good I’m feeling physically and mentally, I think I need more mileage in my training to get my body to respond on race day how I want it to.

I’m running different workouts than I had been in my prior training (a lot more fartleks and tempos and less intervals) and training smarter. Jessica has assigned weekly strength workouts for me and I’m completely dedicated to following the roadmap she’s set up for me to achieve my goal of running a 1:39 half marathon on March 31^st. Being able to have someone else decide what workout I’ll run on what day and at what pace has taken a lot of the “thinking” out of my running and allows me to focus on hitting each workout and the parts I love about running.

While my husband was very supportive of me hiring a running coach to try something new in my training, the rest of my family was a little skeptical. And I understand that. They are supportive of my running but I think that unless you’re a runner yourself you don’t truly understand what goes through the mind of one. We’re an extremely dedicated group, always pushing to be our best and achieve new levels. I would go as far to say I’m obsessed with running; it’s a huge part of who I am and I often plan my days around it. I tried to explain that because I have a free gym at work, I don’t have to pay a monthly membership fee for a gym so this is like my replacement to that. But then I realized I really don’t need to rationalize this. Qualifying for the Boston Marathon is a goal I’ve been laser-focused on for the past few years. I came incredibly close in 2016’s Chicago Marathon when I ran a 3:38 (my qualifying time is 3:35) but I know in my heart I can not only get that 3:35 but I can run even further below it. And I’m going to need to. This year’s Boston qualifiers had to run 3:30 below their qualifying time to even get to run Boston so I will need at least a 3:30 to be safe. I know the first step is getting that half marathon time down and I’m excited to see what Jessica and I can do together to make that happen. I realized that I will never have as much time or energy as I do now at 25 so now is the time to try something new and make things happen.

If you’re considering hiring a running coach, I encourage you to do your homework. Find someone whose philosophy in training resonates with you so that you’re committed to the training process and someone who is willing to push you/readjust when things don’t go according to plan. Not everyone will understand why you’re doing this or why you’re so invested in your running (both financially and with the time-commitment) but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re doing this for you and enjoying the journey to get where you’re going.

Update:

Since writing this post I have run two half marathons, both far surpassing my goal of sub 1:40. The first was the Carmel Half Marathon on March 31^st which I ran in 1:37:09. 4 weeks later I ran the Illinois Half Marathon on April 28^th and finished in 1:36:39 which will stand as my current PR. In this latest training cycle, I dropped 5:05 off of my half marathon PR time, only 3 months after starting working with Jessica. Hiring a coach was one of the best decisions I’ve made for myself and my running and I can’t wait to take on another 26.2 after working with Jessica this summer!