As I blogged earlier this week, I spend a good chunk of Sunday following the online updates of friends running a couple marathons. One of those people, however, was not just running the 26.2 miles of the Portland Marathon. Nope, Deb was adding another 9.8 miles for a total of 36 miles — one for every year, for a birthday celebration.
Seriously, this was Deb’s idea of a way to celebrate her own birthday (which fell on 10/10/10 this year, an extra-awesome thing, if you ask me). Also, she did it in Vibram five-finger shoes. She had a birthday hat for the make-shift toilet paper finish line, too.
I met Deb through Twitter, and I met her in person at the Operation Jack 7-hour run, which she helped organize in Portland. I attended a dinner for the runners/volunteers the night before the run, and I showed up at the same time she did. She and her husband were busy getting their three small children out of the car, but she happened to look up, saw me, and instantly recognized me. I shouldn’t be surprised, because runners really are that friendly, but it was a great way of breaking the ice as I showed up to a random house 700 miles away from home.
Though we communicate most frequently in 140-character tweets, she’s become a good friend and has also voluntarily tried to help me to next step in my life — for which I’m very grateful. One of these days we’ll actually run together!
So you’re saying you want to run 37 miles with me next year? 😉
Thanks for this, Layla. I loved it. I was just thinking about how well we get to know people in 140 character snippets.
I’m not committing to 37 miles (yet)!