I LOVE Thanksgiving. I love being home with my family, I love cooking all day, I love the food… most of all I love that every Thanksgiving feels pretty-much the same. Yes, every year is a little bit different — my first vegetarian Thanksgiving (2007), my first Thanksgiving as a college student (2008) and now my first Thanksgiving as a runner.
I had SO much fun at the Turkey Trot this morning. It was put on by the Howard County Striders , a great runners organization full of great people and …

Wow. I learned so much during this race. I don’t know what it is about races that makes them so much more educational than training runs, but this trail race was way different that my weekly trail runs with the Charlottesville Trail Running Club.
I signed up for this race about two months ago, when I was first getting into trail running. Lots of my fellow CTRCers were going to be racing it and it sounded like so much fun! Combine that with a date nicely placed a few weeks after …

55:25/8:57 PR
This morning was the Charlottesville Fall Classic 10k, a race run by the Charlottesville Running Company. I went into the race with a primary goal of beating my previous 10k best – 1:00:01 at Zooma Annapolis – and a secondary goal of sub-57:00. I planned to run 9:30 min/miles and then go all out the last 1.2 miles.
Despite the fact that weather.com was calling for rain, we got only a light drizzle before the start time. Though there were puddles along the course, we stayed dry through the finish, …

This past Saturday I joined a friend of mine in driving to Lynchburg to run in the Virginia 10 Miler. It was really short notice – on Thursday she told me that her roommate had bailed on her (apparently visiting a boyfriend is more important than running! The horror!) and she really didn’t want to go alone. So on Saturday the 26th of September I woke up at 4:30 am and became Rose Wilken for the day.
The drive there was dark. Lynchburg is about an hour South of Charlottesville, so …