Hi! I’m glad you’re here! I’m Cassie, a 29-year-old Colorado native. I live out on the Colorado plains and teach English at a small high school, where I’ve taught for eight years. For most of my life, I’ve been a small-town girl. I grew up in the country outside a small town, went to college in a bigger town, then moved to a different small town and started teaching.

I started running in high school, though not remotely competitively. Aside from the one season I played soccer (oh, you didn’t know that “played” and “bench-warmed” are synonyms?), I was not an athlete as a kid. I sporadically ran/walked around the corn fields behind my house, with two goals: 1. Don’t get fat. 2. Stay in good enough shape that I wouldn’t be left in the dust while hiking with my dad and brother. Then, I went to college in Fort Collins – an awesome city with mountains, open spaces, a terrific trail system, and a gorgeous campus with a perimeter that’s about a 5k. Colorado State also has a rec center bigger than my hometown. All those amazing running opportunities, along with my freshman roommate (who was a high school state champion cross-country runner), took my running from sporadic to almost daily. I loved it, but I still ran only for fitness and never dreamed of competing, especially since I also loved to hike the nearby mountain trails as often as possible on the weekends and would rather do that than run (trail running wasn’t so trendy then, so of course I didn’t think of that).

I graduated in 2007 and took a teaching job out here on the plains of Colorado, which was quite an adjustment for this mountain-loving girl. When you read that I’m from rural Colorado, you were probably picturing something like this:

And you were wrong. It’s more like this:

-> flat. With cows.

(Thank you, Google, for these images).

Since hiking became a much less-frequent option out here but I still loved being outdoors, I started running more and more. Not long after I moved, I met a girl named Jaylin, a fitness-freak like me who worked out at my gym. When we met, I was bridal bootcamping it for my 2008 wedding, but the next year, Jaylin convinced me to run my first half-marathon – Colorado Colfax in 2009 (which she ran five months pregnant, because she’s a rockstar) — and I was hooked. I ran the half at the Denver Marathon (before it was Rock ‘n Roll) that fall, then decided to go big and try for a full. In June 2010, the hubby and I took a vacation to Seattle, where I ran Rock ‘n Roll Seattle. And so began my love affair with the full marathon.

Since then, I’ve run the Colorado Colfax Marathon (2011), Rock ‘n Roll Denver (2011 ), the Estes Park Marathon (2012), Boston (2013), Rock ‘n Roll Denver (again - 2013), and the Colorado Fall Classic Marathon (2014) .

(This is me fighting the wind during Estes. It is not my picture…it’s thanks to Walt Hester of The Estes Park Trail Gazette.)

I also throw in the occasional half or 10k, just for funsies, and a very rare 5k, because I hate 5ks.

And that’s me in a nutshell. See the about the blog page for more!