7 around the Charles with the orginal running buddy:)

Today reminded me that its been way too long since I have run with one Katherine Bouwkamp, with whom I shambled 7 miles around the Charles River tonight. Let me tell you a little more about Kate:

About a year and a half ago, a couple months post an ugly breakup, I found myself still trying to find my feet. Another friend (Kim Fader) emailed me to tell me about the Seacoast half marathon in Portsmouth, NH--13.1 miles in early to mid-November, on a relatively flat course. Something you may or may not already know about me is that up until this point, I had been That Girl at the Marathon. You know the one. She's relatively athletic and active, maybe even runs a little, as I did then, but is not A Runner. She's the girl who watches the marathon every year, and every year says "I should run a marathon...well, maybe not a marathon, but I should run a half..." while drinking a cold and tasty brew. This was me for several years, mind you. And obviously I had said some version of this statement to Kim, who emailed me about the aforementioned race.

The timing was right this time. The race would be about 3 days shy of my 26th birthday, there was plenty of time to train, and I had sort of lost myself for a while before--and was thinking that maybe doing something selfish, something that would only benefit me, would be just the fix I needed. (Incidentally, it also benefited the Portsmouth coastline cleanup efforts--allow me the literary license here, though.) Still, knowing myself as I do, I thought the best way to actually make this happen was to line up another poor fool--a local training buddy. Soon Kate, a good friend of mine from Emerson (the first, in fact) was also in.

In the end, there was a group of five of us that ran the Seacoast half that year. But it was for Kate and I that the event turned out to be some sort of cosmic starting point. Soon 8-miles in the woods on the weekends was normal, and gu a way a way of life. We did our second half, Big Lake, in NH, in May 2007--Kate's third, my second. Before long, she'd signed up for the Nike Women's Marathon, and was running distances that seemed as though they couldn't possibly be real. (Needless to say, last October, she rocked those 26.2 miles.) Kate was the one who forced me to rest my broken can last fall when the lack of running made me insane, irritable, and no picnic to be around. And she's the running buddy who knows when I need to stop versus when I'm just feeling whiny, who will tell me to speed up or slow down, who will always have a good story or two for the road, and who has been one of the most stalwart supporters in my goal to run Boston in two months.

So KATE! These miles were overdue. :) Can't wait until we get to do one of these ridiculous races together.