I started running in college. I was in my second year and had just said goodbye to nearly a decade of 6-days a week of cheerleading practices. I started running to stay in shape.
It took a few years, but I kept running because it became my escape. I kept running to not think about deadlines, commitments or what was due.
A few years later, I fell in love with running thanks to the community. I fell in love because there is nothing better than an hour on the trails with a running buddy. I often joke that the conversations that take place during those runs rival what I’d imagine most people talk about at a bar past 2 a.m.
Today, the running community faced a tragedy that I’m certain not a single one of those runners in Boston anticipated as they laced up at the starting line this morning. My heart aches for those runners, but even more so for the community who surrounds them.
Every runner knows as wonderful as the personal time, the endorphins and the medals are, it’s the community that keeps you coming back for more. It’s the moms, the dads, the husbands, the wives and the best friends who will get out of bed at the crack of dawn, carry obnoxious signs for miles and lug all of the extra bags and goodies to the finish line, only to see us trot by for half of a second. It’s their enthusiasm and dedication that make every mile worth the journey, whether that be for three miles or 26.2. While thinking and praying for Boston tonight, I’m certainly hugging all of my personal cheerleaders, and the reasons I run, a little tighter.
“The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other… but to be with each other.”
You know those pre-first day of school butterflies? The ones that leave you ready to throw up and want to just quit the whole thing before it even starts butterflies? Welp, for some reason, I couldn’t shake those same little butterflies on Friday night, the eve of our third Great Urban Race.
Couldn’t sleep, terrible dreams, woke up every 20 minutes butterflies. And for what? An awesome day of exploring where I knew I wasn’t going to die (fingers crossed, they had made me throw up while eating squid and unhand-cuff myself at a mob museum in the past), making friends with strangers would be incredibly easy and I was going to partake in taking obsessive amounts of photos and video…long story short, I’m a big wimp.
As excited as I was to be finish and be rid of my nerves, the Great Urban Race isn’t your typical run as fast as you can for X amount of miles and cross the finish line race, as they say it best, GUR is a wild urban adventure and the stories that go along with it are the best part.
After winning tickets to compete last minute in 2012, P and I wound up falling in love with this race concept and followed it to the National Championships in Las Vegas last November (you can read all about those adventures here and here).
In 2013, we came prepared. No more of the single smartphone, map-less planning for us.
We arrived at the starting line with a map ready to go and were lucky enough to have one of our best friends join us as photographer / navigator extraordinaire. We also met up with some dear friends who were crucial in helping to solve the clues and keeping us all going.
We split the clues 50 / 50 between our two teams and less than 30 minutes after the starting horn, we were off and running with a plan and most of the clues solved. The worst part was over, phew.
I’ll spare you the play-by-play of the next hour and a half, but here are some of the highest points:
1. We got to walk on broken glass. How cool is that? And despite what it looks like, it didn’t hurt one bit (I was pleasantly surprised).
2. The photo tic-tac-toe clue is always a favorite. This year we opted for: take a photo with a stranger with a tattoo (how cool is she?), take a video giving a stranger a high five and Tweet a photo of all teammates “Smizing” (apparently a Tyra Banks thing? I don’t think we mastered that one).
Our tattoo friend. How great is her hair?
“Simizing” Tyra wouldn’t approve.
3. The next clue took us to a “secret” prohibition bar in Edgewood that is actually buried behind a bookcase in a pizza joint named Vesuvius. So. Cool. We put our googling to the test to answer questions like “What Minnesota republican was the major voice behind he National Prohibition Act in 1919?” in record time.
4. We dug up our best “every good boy deserves fudge” knowledge to decipher music notes to give us a phrase, and then act like them in a photo. We were bees if you can’t tell from our stellar impressions.
Our best bee impressions.
In all, it was another fantastic day and took me to more parts of the city I haven’t explored on my own (which is secretly my FAVORITE part about this race). A huge, huge thanks to all of the stop locations for their incredible generosity and pure southern hospitality (check out a list of our favorite places below).
Now, just as we were a year ago, we are counting down the days to Nationals where we will be in the hunt for the $10,000 (or more likely, another great adventure to share). Until next time masterminds.
It’s not all fun and games: sometimes they make you think TOO hard.
Our tops picks for the 2013 race locations (aka, go check out these places Atlanta):
Vesuvius Pizzeria: look for the bookcase in the back hallway. Have a great time.
Growing up, we had two rules around the dinner table: 1. you must at least try everything on your plate and 2. you had to share one story about the favorite part of your day.
In a family of six, my parents had their hands full with sporting events, friends and homework, therefore making spending time around the dinner table no easy task. However, it was rare that there was a night that went by that we didn’t eat as a family, even if that meant eating in shifts from time to time.
We didn’t have smart phones, personal laptops, iPads and email to interrupt our family time. To say the landscape has changed is an understatement. However, dinner at the Dennihy house hasn’t changed one bit. Sure, the phones are kept in sperate rooms (as opposed to pulling the wall phone off the hook as my Dad seemed to do nightly to keep people from interrupting), but creating genuine personal time is much more of a conscious effort.
A dear friend of mine and I have had endless conversations around technology in our lives over the years, and as we both work in the digital marketing space, avoiding it is impossible. She has been urging me to watch the Ted talk “Connected, but Alone” for just as many years. I finally sat down to watch the talk and I cannot say I was surprised by my love for it.
As we watch technology evolve, it makes our lives so much more simple on so many levels. Connections are now a click, a tweet or a post away. We can have simultaneous conversations with 10 people over a group text all while sending an email and capturing a photo for Instagram. Facebook is in talks to release a PHONE for crying out loud. In short, technology is incredible.
Then why is communicating itself harder than ever before?
Because communication is more than a string of words. Communication leads to relationships, which lead to the betterment of ourselves, which is no surprise, hard work.
In Sherry’s words, “we expect more from technology and less from each other.”
If we want to become more connected, we have to expect more from each other and let technology guide us in getting there – not serve as the sole route.
Is texting a friend easier than spending thirty minutes on the phone each week? Sure is. Do I expect to remain friends without decline over the next decade by sending text messages? Better not put all of my marbles in that bucket.
Now get to work, I owe some people some phone calls / dinner dates / afternoon runs.
