My name is Kate, and I’m a third-year Computer Science major at the University of Virginia. And I’m a runner.

I think that DailyMile is one of the absolute best sites on the internet. You can view my profile here. Everyone on the site is super friendly and I’ve met so many amazing athletes. I don’t know what I’d do without DM!

Through High School I was never really an athlete. I horseback rode on the weekends, and helped out at the barn mucking stalls and throwing hay bales down from the loft, but I didn’t do team sports. I remember saying on more than one occasion that the only way I would run anywhere is if a bear was chasing me.

Last March everything changed. I was on vacation with my mom,  and to keep myself busy I woke up early in the mornings to go on the hotel’s daily powerwalk. Halfway through the hilly 3 mile trek on the Jamaican golf course I decided that, hey, I could probably run this. So I did. And the next day I did it again. By the end of the week I was hooked. I bought myself a pair of running shoes when I got back home and I’ve been running ever since.

I still consider myself a pretty inexperienced runner, and I love it!  I never do anything halfway, so becoming a runner meant digging in and immersing myself in the culture. I read blogs, checked out all of the back-copys of Runners World at the local library, and pestered the local running store employees for tips and information about upcoming local races. I even enrolled in the Running class at UVA.

Running is important to me because it was the first thing in my life that really challenged me. I’ve always been a good student – Computer Science and math just make sense to me. But running was different. It wasn’t something that I was just “good” at right off the bat. I had to push myself out of my comfort zone, really strive for that feeling of accomplishment that came at the end of my first five-miler.  Through running I’m doing things I never would have thought I was capable of (like the half marathon I did in November 2009!).

There’s a whole world of running out there for me to explore, and I’ll do my best to chronicle that journey here. Thanks for reading!