Social Media has completely transformed my fitness experience. I used to use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter solely with friends and family with which I regularly interacted in person. Slowly, I began to add old high school friends and new friends to my Facebook account. As I became more and more passionate about my running, my social networking feeds started to become much more fitness related. What began to happen to me is that I believe I was somewhat putting my friends, family, and acquaintances off with all of the running and fitness-related posts. Slowly I began to get more involved with Twitter and Instagram and really began to participate in Twitter running chats and following other runners on both Twitter and Instagram. I started to realize that Twitter and Instagram are great places for me to focus on my fitness interests. I can feel free to post all of my running and fitness related pictures and musings and look at other people’s running and fitness related pictures and posts. Slowly but surely I found myself limiting my fitness pictures and posts solely to Twitter and Instagram and limiting my pictures and posts of all non-fitness related items to Facebook. …

September 11th, 2001 was supposed to be a routine Tuesday. My students filed in and sat in their desks chipper or sullen, depending on the kid. I took attendance after the tardy bell rang and began class. We were annotating a passage from Sandra Cisneros’ story “Woman Hollering Creek.” In it, Cisneros transforms the myth of La Llorona (weeping woman) to La Gritona (hollering warrior). The woman in the story finally recognizes her inner strength and becomes empowered. Our beautiful class discussion was interrupted when my next door classroom neighbor rushed over to report the horrific events of that morning.

One after one, parents pulled their kids out of school … all they wanted was to hug their babies and know for certain that they were safe. I, dating my then boyfriend/now husband with no plans of children yet, could not exactly relate to that all-encompassing parental love, but I didn’t need to. We were all yearning for our loved ones and for normalcy. Because I taught eleventh graders, I felt it appropriate to show my students the news coverage of the horrific event. I also recognized my responsibility to my students to console them as they consoled me. To come together with my fellow faculty members in order to create a huge chain of love as we watched, over and over again, symbols of American prosper crumble amidst a beautiful sky. We watched our brothers and sisters fall to their deaths in hopes of escaping the horror within those buildings. We watched first responders risk life and limb to attempt to save as many innocent lives as possible, while most of those incredibly courageous individuals never made it out alive. We mourned together. Our school counselors were on hand to help us all navigate this horror and we prayed. We all prayed in our own ways. …

Today as I ran I thought mainly about two recent interactions with customer service representatives. I love shopping online as much as the next girl, but sometimes I want to shop in a store around other people and be helped by a live person. I truly appreciate all of the people who work in sales and serve customers with a smile and a warm tone. These people do still exist … I encountered two friendly sales associates just the other day, as a matter of fact. But, the two recent bad experiences I had are irking me. …

Summer’s over. Back to reality.

I recently read a few articles by ambassadors for my beloved hometown marathon, The Chevron Houston Marathon, on the marathon press center website. The overriding theme of the articles was, “just keep going. Don’t fret about your timed place in the race. Do YOUR personal best.” This spoke to me. I ruminated on this for days. Yes, that’s what keeps us going despite self-doubt, fatigue, maybe even pain. It is that need to overcome the tough stuff in order to truly feel alive.

It is about testing the physical and mental limits in order to define the human spirit.

As I’ve often said, runners pick each other up because they are used to falling themselves. What runner hasn’t had a “bad” run? Is there even such a thing as a “bad” run? Yes, yes there is, but I wish we runners would say no. No, every run is a good run because it is a run in the books. But every runner knows this is a Pollyanna view and we all say if a person says that they are simply lying to themselves. For the simple fact is, some runs seem effortless, some seem laborious, some are finished quickly and efficiently, some take forever to end and make us feel horrible about ourselves. I guess those bad runs keep us humble. They keep us grounded. They remind us that running is physically and mentally difficult. It necessitates sacrifice in all areas of our lives and it challenges us in many ways. It is what we do and if it were easy than everyone would do it. These running ambassadors’ articles delivered the message that I needed to read. Isn’t it funny how sometimes it seems as though the universe presents to us what we need the most when we need it the most? …

Summer running is so very difficult. I am off of work for the summer, so I always get excited about all of the free time I will enjoy and always have big plans for my running. I am pretty much fine with maintaining my mileage through June and the first part of July, but then something happens after the Independance Day holiday. I begin to feel oppressed by the heat and humidity. Suddenly I have trouble maintaining mileage. Suddenly I feel weak and worthless, inept and inefficient, powerless and paralyzed. I hate those feelings. I start to get REALLY discouraged.

Recently, I was driving my girls around and from the backseat I overheard my oldest daughter (a soccer player) telling my youngest daughter (also a soccer player) that she “wasn’t good at heading the ball and she just couldn’t do it.” I turned to her and said, “Sweetie, what you mean to say is, ‘I struggle with headers. It’s something I need to work on. Don’t say you can’t do it. Keep working at it.’” This made me think about myself and how rewarding it is for me to run and swim and practice yoga. …

We feel we are neglecting our children if we spend time on ourselves aside from their activities. I believe parents NEED to find a passion that they enjoy outside of their children, and a form of exercise is the most beneficial.

I found running at the age of 35, and I’ve never looked back. I am careful to tailor my running and strength training sessions around my family’s schedules so that I don’t miss out on their wonderful activities, but I no longer feel guilty about enjoying an activity meant solely for my own enjoyment. I recently saw a wonderful advertisement by Coffee Blocks that really got me thinking about this topic. …