I Run These Towns

"It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great." Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own. During my long run last weekend I was thinking of this quote, one of my all-time favorite quotes from a fantastic movie.  I was doing a long run in a snowstorm, taking hits in the face from a biting single digit temperature wind, yet I had a smile on my face. The run wasn't just hard; it was brutal. And all the while I was thinking that it is the hard that makes it great. Life is hard. (I'll qualify that by saying that it's as hard as it can get living in a first world country with family, friends, a good job, and being relatively healthy.) But I mean to be a self-actualized human in this scenario, life gets hard.  We expect so much out of life, and it doesn't always cooperate.  It's what you do with the blows when they come that determine your character. Do you let them keep you down, or ...

In the eight years I've lived in Michigan I've done a lot of complaining about winter. Yet somehow this week I fell in love with a fabulous northern Michigan community despite the below zero temperatures. I'm not sure if it was the great downtown or the enthusiasm from community and business leaders...or it could've been the cocktails.  At any rate I'm smitten with the City of Marquette. Marquette is a city of just over 20,000 people located on picturesque Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There's no easy way to get to Marquette other than driving across the UP. I can get to my parents' house in West Virginia in around the same time it takes me to get to Marquette. The UP is known for its particularly snowy and cold winters, and despite my general aversion to winter I was excited for the adventure. View of Lake Superior from the 6th floor of the historic Landmark Inn in Downtown Marquette Upon arriving to the hotel we met the former ma...

My husband and I travel more than the average bears, and I've got packing (particularly running gear) down to a science. This weekend/early next week I'm heading to northern Michigan for a work trip, and I've already packed my must have running travel gear. It takes up a lot of room, but it's totally worth it. A lot of runners live and die by a running watch. I wear one during long races, but I don't really use it to time myself. It's not a fancy watch but rather a Timex Ironman from Target. It keeps me on a general schedule. Every time I use my watch to try to get a PR I become obsessed with that goal instead of just enjoying the run. My watch's main goal is to let me know how much time is left before the race starts. I try to ignore it once I get started in a race. I take it with me when I travel, because I often prefer to run a number of minutes instead of specific miles so I can enjoy a new town. Lots of runners use different fuel - Gu, Clif Bloks, e...

As a Detroit lover I'm all too familiar with ruin porn . If you're not acquainted, it's a form of photography that shows neglected and abandoned structures that have become our modern ruins. Detroit is ground zero for ruin porn. In fact if you google the phrase "ruin porn", you'll get lots of links to these architectural gems in the city that have fallen into decay. On our recent trip to California I didn't expect we'd find modern ruins. When we were planning our trip and decided to drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, I knew I wanted to stop in Monterey. In the late 60's my dad was stationed at Fort Ord, California and lived there.  It seemed like the perfect place to stop on our way down the coast.  After exploring downtown Monterey and its Fisherman's Wharf we decided to drive to Fort Ord, just a few miles away from where we were staying downtown.  Fort Ord closed in 1994, and I wasn't sure exactly what we'd find.  When we arriv...

My husband is a Michigan State alumnus and die hard fan, so when Michigan State won the Big 10 championship, guaranteeing them a spot to play in the Rose Bowl, it also guaranteed us a trip to California. Admittedly I wasn't excited about the idea of this trip given that our other potential trip alternatives were more appealing to me, but a week on the west coast in warm weather turned out to be the perfect cure for the Michigan winter blues. I insisted, however, that if we were going to California we were not just going to go to Los Angeles. So we compromised by flying into San Francisco and starting our trip there. I've been to San Francisco once before , in 2006, to run the Nike Women's Half Marathon (my first). I fell in love with the city then (we all know my penchant for falling in love quickly and easily with great cities).  Interestingly as we've traveled more and seem more places, my barometer for what I love about places has changed. San Francisco has it a...

Dear 2013: it's you; not me. After a spectacularly difficult year (culminating with six days without power over Christmas), 2013 finally hit the road. In fairness we did end the year with a lovely trip to California, but I won't let that derail this important point.  But even with the highlights of 2013, I wasn't sad to see her go. Now here we are in 2014, and this, THIS is going to be a good year. We were in Pasadena to witness my husband's Michigan State Spartans win the 2014 Rose Bowl on New Year's Day in brilliant fashion, and that's enough to keep him happy for months (which naturally makes me happy as well). During our trip to California I decided that 2014 is the year that I will make an effort to seize the moment, to run faster, and to challenge myself even more than usual (to increase my overall awesomeness quota). I've spent a lot of the last few years putting things on hold because we might have a baby. I've tried not to do that, but it...