Cochise - reloaded! (Jane)

Since today was a 'big run day', it seems like a good time to mention my dear friend Heather. She and I trained together for two marathons. We practiced the finer skills of British accents while pounding out long runs through the hills of Buckhead (Ridgewood ring a bell?) - you know, sometimes you just run out of things to talk about on a 4-hour run, so it helps to be able to repeat entire conversations in a proper Cockney accent (Nick, it was awful)! Okay, so we thought it was funny. And we amused ourselves with hand-puppets (that sometimes turned into dog-fights) whenever the sun hit our backs, and sometimes, just sometimes, we'd be running along, and all of the sudden realize we were 'in the zone', and get these silly grins on our faces. Sigh. Heather and her family moved to Dallas! I mean, there's NO COCHISE in DALLAS, not to mention Nuevo Laredo! But I digress, or regress...but I miss my friend. See us below at the start of the Marine Corps Marathon in 2003!

(Here is where I segue back into TrainStrong...Cochise!) Today was BIG RUN day. This is where being a first-timer really is good because you don't know what is coming, so you don't anticipate it. Whew. What a doosey! Nick, our volunteer instructor from the UK (picture is somewhere on the blog), who also happens to have at least two geek gadgets in motion when he is not, wore a handy little GPS on the run so we could share it with our friends! If you cut/paste this link, you can see how we blazed our trail (okay, so really Scott since he was the only one running with Nick the entire time! Everyone else ran somewhere between 2.8 - 5 miles) - check it out at http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/3791559. You get a sense of the elevation change - and where the red line seems to scribble back and forth - well, we did! Since everyone has varying speeds, Stacy does a great job of basically keeping us all together by 'looping' us along the course. And just like last time, it was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of t'other, gasping for breath as though I had never run before. (I was secretly hoping that by raising my core body temp that it would kill off whatever germ is persistently tickling my throat!) And like last time, the trainers encouraged everyone, every step of the way :). We did it!