Thank you for stopping by my blog, I truly appreciate you taking the time to look around! I’m enjoying the wonderful blogging community that so many of you have welcomed me into, and want to do my piece to contribute.

I was recently married (Summer of 2011), which was the best day of my life! I married the man of my dreams with my friends and family surrounding me. When I began this blog, I’d been running for about 2 years now, never really running more than 4 miles at a time. Once Tyler (my husband) and I were engaged, we decided we wanted to run races all over the country together, and started signing up for 8k races… and finally a 1/2 marathon!

Our first half marathon was March 18th, 2012- the Shamrock. We were both extremely excited for the oppertunity to run together… and this blog is a Chronicle of our journey towards that goal. Our second 1/2 marathon was in May 2012, in the hilly town of Williamsburg (Run for the Dream). This will require much more dedicated training than our Shamrock route did, so here we go to up the anti on our training! We are using Hal Higdons 1/2 marathon training Schedule: Novice 2. Hopefully our journey will inspire you to run a race… or take on some other unsurmountable task and take the baby steps towards achieving your goal!

When I began to run, I still struggled with my self image…. while my body was recovered from an eating disorder, my mind was not.

Let me back up a minute.

When I was a teenager, I struggled with a serious eating disorder that almost took my life. My entire focus was to be model skinny, at which point my body began to shut down. I lost much of my hair, did not have a period for the course of nearly three years, and was chronically low on iron (anemia)- which meant I fainted nearly every morning. And other slightly more inconvenient points through out the day.  My health declined to a point that I had trouble taking a flight of stairs and was chronically cold all the time… even when I was sweating.

I know countless girls/women can identify with this phenomenon, which is currently manifesting itself in the incredibly popular term “thinspiration”. This is when girls/women write instructional blogs and on how to purge and starve themselves in order to lose weight. Even our friend Pinterest is being flooded with scrawny girls to inspire women to lose weight at all costs.

Friends, this makes me sick. Having spent the last almost 8 years trying to recover from an eating disorder, it’s disturbing to see that tomorrows women are consumed with one thing: weight loss. These beautiful girls should be mapping out their futures, not spending hours a day hating themselves and how they look.

The intent of my blog is to promote a healthy lifestyle that allows ice cream and chocolate, while inspiring women to get out and run a couple miles, do yoga, take a bike ride, go on long walks around a lake, swim in the ocean and breathe the beautiful air, allowing their souls to be invigorated. Women who truly love their bodies because it’s that body that allows them to enjoy nature in such a magnificent manner.

I hope this blog motivates you to live a healthy life-style.

I’m married, work full time, and well as in full time school, and am finding time to run. And when I procrastinate my workouts, I think about the other women who are running who are busier than I am, and it gets me out the door. So leave me a comment if you are one of those wonder-women! You are truly my inspiration, and I’d love to hear your tips on fitting it all in there!

If you scroll down to some of my original posts, you’ll see some great wedding photos, and hear a little more about my life as a newly wed!

We’re all in this together, so leave comments, tips and inspirational stories, and if you share the same passion I do, link your blogging community up and interact!