A new goal

John and I met in graduate school in 2002. When we met John was just coming off of the "Summer of John" where he worked out every day for hours on end while laid off from some corrupt company (I forget which one). He had giant muscles and only 1 or 2 tattoos --how things change! He wasn't a long-time runner like me, but he was super into working out.

I had recently completed my first marathon, the Country Music Marathon, and had the running bug again. I had been on the cross-country, indoor and outdoor track teams in high school (although I quit my senior year to be editor of the newspaper) and took a little time off in college before getting back into running. I ran the New Jersey Marathon in 2003, hurt my hip and then was a half-lazy runner for a while. But, in graduate school John and I would go to the gym and bar together and he'd listen to me whine about economics and statistics and order me another mudslide to drown my sorrows. I moved to Atlanta after graduation for a few years but relocated to the DC area in 2008.

Since 2008 John and I have been running and racing together -- trying to keep each other motivated. We are very different types of runners. John has taken up Chi-running after he found the errors of his weight-lifting ways and monitors his nutrition, mileage, pace and times closely. He runs in the morning hours before I am even thinking about getting up. I am an ipod middle of the day/nighttime runner who for the past 7 years hasn't tracked distance or time during training (except to assume 10 minute miles X number of miles I am supposed to run). Although, I recently bought my first Garmin and am moving to the dark side of mileage/time tracking.

Last year we completed our first trail run -- a 25K in central Virginia where one really needed to be a mountain goat to actually run the entire thing. Since then, John has been hooked on trail running...me less so. I'm a little bit scared of being on the trails by myself. John completed his first ultra marathon a few months ago (a 50k) and has run quite a few marathons since our grad school days. We both are signed up to run the Marine Corps Marathon in October but are looking for a new challenge to see what our bodies can do. And, considering that Boston lowered their qualifying times to levels we may never be able to reach, we've tossed around the idea of running a "real" ultra of 50 miles on the trails. Seems like a good goal?

We are planning on tracking our training, races and whatever random garbage two old running buddies/policy analysts feel like talking about here.