About Sweaty Kid

If you’re like me and the first thing you do when you find a new running blog is click around to find race recaps and PRs so that you may compare yourself and glean information and insight from the person’s running experiences, here you go:

• Marathon: 3:11:42 (January 2012) (Race recap)
• Half-marathon: 1:32:15 (October 2011) (Race recap)
• 15K: 1:02:48 (October 2009)
• 10K: 39:04 (March 2012) (Race recap)
• 8K: 31:54 (November 2010) (Race recap)
• 4 miles: 26:30 (July 2010) (Race recap)
• 5K: 19:30 (October 2010) (Race recap)

Other race recaps:

Veteran’s Day 8K (November 2011) — 33:50-something (Race recap)

Juneau Marathon (July 2011) — 3:24:50 (Race recap)

Sweetheart’s Relay (February 2011) — 34:08 (Race recap)

48th Annual Ocean Beach/John and Jessie Kelley 11.6 mile Road Race (August 2010) — 1:25:20 (Race recap)

Niantic Bay 10K (June 2010) — (Race recap)

ING Georgia Marathon (March 2010) — 3:30:31 (Race recap)

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And if you were looking for a self-indulgent introductory section and backstory, here it is:

My name is Cathleen. I am 25. I grew up in Connecticut, went to college in New York, lived in Georgia for a year, and currently live in Alaska where I work in the field of nature education.

At the wildly precarious and impressionable age of 12, I began running.

My dad is to blame for this.

A small finish line photo from one of his Boston Marathons used to sit framed in the living room; one where he is gaunt and spent and drenched with sweat. I hold vague memories of standing with my mom at roadsides, excitedly watching for him to run by.

In short, through no fault of my own, my childhood had involved a steady inculcation into the misconception that distance running was cool.

Very, very cool.

Surely then, it came as no surprise when I grew up and discovered I’d been blessed with the same gene that coded for, not “cool,” unfortunately, but that peculiar fusion of diligence, compulsion and madness that might be used to characterize certain runners.

I am not and have never been notably fast or slow, but am still a standard endurance endorphins glutton.

My two high school loves were cross country and lacrosse.

In college, though, I temporarily abandoned those sports and walked onto the rowing team.

The waterways of central New York in a rare moment of icelessness.

A little shockingly, I managed to survive all four years of college crew. In fact, in my first post-college year, I found there was a gaping hole in my life – one that had been formerly occupied by early mornings when my mind had to wage war on my legs all while sporting an unforgiving spandex unisuit of the sort that makes love handles appear unfairly larger than they actually are.

Now, thanks to the softening effects of nostalgia, I look back on those days with an ache in my throat for how lovely they were.

We were a highly serious and distinguished collection of souls. I believe I sported a fake mustache and cigarette for this photograph. Photo credit: CPOS.

Currently I’m two years out of college and have been thrust rudely into a world where I have to make mildly challenging decisions and try to impress people in interviews and other vaguely grown up behaviors.

In an attempt to postpone my entry into the actual real world, I joined AmeriCorps in my first year out of college. That year, I lived in Atlanta where, among other things, I taught kids about snakes and bees and ran my first marathon.

I joined AmeriCorps again in my second year and served another 11 months of my real-world-delay-system in Juneau, Alaska. I liked it so much that I decided to stay.

Now I’m nearly three years out of college and still living in Alaska.  I work three part-time jobs, not a single one of which has any conventional benefits, but when you love the work you do and the people you work with and make at least enough to cover rent and food, nothing else matters much. I’m slowly learning to stop worrying so much over the uncertainty of my future, and am finally realizing that life is best lived in the same manner I complete a long run: one little mile at a time.

I have no idea what I’ll be into next, but I know that variations on the endurance theme and the lasting impact of athletics will accompany me wherever I go.

Occasionally I flip through women's fitness clothing catalogs and invariably all of the spandex-sporting women are grinning ear-to-ear while gallivanting over some pristine hillside. Naturally I wanted a photo of myself engaging in the exact same.

Lastly, I have a weakness for bad puns and really bad metaphors.