Holiday frenzy

The sisters and our famous running shoes are all caught up in the holiday frenzy which means:

• We haven't updated our blog in awhile
• Our families are running around a lot, but we are not getting in our usual mileage 
• Responsibility lists are never ending for us which means we are tired
• We are probably less than cheerful at times because of our reduced physical activity
• Our shoes are anxious for our next running adventure
• Vern is anxious that she will forget something (Halloween 2014 style) 
•  Lord willing this will happen NEW YEARS DAY!

The sisters and our shoes as "fast food" at the Ithaca Halloween Trail Run 2014!

Super pumped about our Spartans! One more photo to offer them some positive mojo! GO GREEN!

Happy Holidays from the sisters
Vern and Mird 

Thankful for my sista

This Thanksgiving will be a tad sad because only half of the sisterhood will be represented at the Annual Pilgram's Prance at Coast Guard Park in Ferrysburg.  Mird was there last year, but this year Vern will be running and Mird, well Mird, is opting out... for more sleep I think.  Super lame.  Insert dramatic sigh.

Anyhow, Vern couldn't back out; she has to run clad as Sacajawea because last year, Praise the Lord, she actually won the 10k option of the dual 5k/10k event. Pretty sure there weren't many females runners for that one!  Anyhow, the Sacajawea costume is the fairly odd traveling trophy for the well known (for locals) event which offers no official prizes, but is also free to all and provides folks with an opportunity to burn off a lot of calories before consuming even more!  It is an honor to wear the costume, a real honor, and so wear it I shall!  Join me if you are looking for a Thanksgiving adventure of epic proportions! Here's the deets!

Thanksgiving Morning (like tomorrow)
8:00am )dont be late or you will be running alone)
Coast Guard Park
5k/10k Trail Runs
Free to all

PS  I am so very thankful for Mird!  She is the absolute best little sister a girl could ask for!


Vern out

Yes, Virginia, There is a Team AWESOME!

SO this past weekend the Traveling Running Shoes took their show on the road again.  I will provide two versions of this story.

Version One:  The abbreviated version of this story is as follows:

We drank beer. We flew to Virginia.  We drank beer.  We woke up and ran a race. We drank more beer.  We watched one of the most amazing MSU games of all time while drinking beer and then you guessed it, we drank more beer.   We ate an amazing dinner of Alaskan Salmon, Minnesota Wild Rice and roasted vegetables.  We drank more beer.  We slept.  We went for a recovery run.  We drank more beer.  We flew home.  THE END

Lessons learned on this trip.  Airport Beer is the absolute best; it enhances the flying experience by at least 33% although I believe more research needs to be done to support this theory.


Version Two:  The longer more exciting, less beer filled and more detailed version is as follows. 

For this one I am honing in on just the race experience so it doesn't get too long. We arrived at the race a few minutes later than planned because it was difficult to find the actual location of the start of the race.  Even with smart phones and GPS some remote places are still difficult to find and this was one of them!  So we arrived all jacked up from a somewhat stressful search for the trail.  Once we arrived, stress levels diminished and festive race mood filled our bodies and the surrounding air.  We quickly checked in, traded in our usual traveling shoes for a pair of test run Merrell shoes; At the Merrell table, they were giving out free sunglasses, if you were willing to run in their shoes and provide feedback about your experience in them.  We are suckers for free stuff so we totally signed up and we may have signed up for a raffle or two while we were at it!  Of course, we took a slew of pre-race pictures because we knew memories were being made and records broken.  In the span of about twenty minutes, we got ourselves completely prepared for the adventure...

The Substitute Traveling Running Shoes: faster than the average substitute teacher!

Pre race photo session!

Team Awesome Sally is taking the picture so she is not represented.
Left to right Miranda Daniels, Ivar Van Koten, Dominica Van Koten, Veronica Constantine.

OCtober 17, 2015  Willowsford, VA
State Number 4

After all that prep work we were exhausted possibly because of our prior day's beer consumption and lack of sleep, but we cared not.  We dragged our tired bodies to the starting line when we were directed to do so.  So the pre-race announcements were quite amazing.  The best pre-race announcements I have ever heard and I have stood through many a race day announcement so this is a HUGE compliment.  Generally I pay no attention to these announcements.  They tend to be boring and don't generally add much value to a race.  I generally zone out during such announcements and come to just in time to get trampled by a few people when the gun fires announcing the start of the race! However, this announcer was Australian. Man I am a sucker for an authentic accent so I was listening quite mesmerized actually as he said, "at about mile 4 you will travel through an active construction site so watch out for the bulldozer".

I totally thought he was joking until I got to mile four and saw for myself that he wasn't.  He followed up the construction site news with a safety warning to, "watch out for the low power lines shortly after the construction site".  He wasn't kidding about that one either.  The guy has a great accent, but he doesn't joke around!  Anyhow, the trail was a lot more challenging than we had anticipated which meant we were all slower than usual (except for the first mile when I tried to set a new trail record and ran an 8:04 mile!), but we still had three out of the five members on our team place in their respective ages groups and we were the first place overall team.  The Merrell shoes were quite comfortable and I think they may be magical. They singlehandedly (or double-footedly actually) saved me from biffing it at one point.  I had tripped over a rock and nearly went down, but then mysteriously I recovered before the anticipated impact of the ground.  It can only be explained by magic.  The shoes definitely were magical in that instance and somehow stuck to the trail. Mird wasn't so lucky she wiped out (twice) but she was okay just a little beat up and she said it had nothing to do with the shoes and everything to do with the "bloody hard trail full of rocks, dirt and roots".  We are hoping to find the Merrell shoes at a retailer near us so we can buy a pair.   The 10K was actually 6.82 miles so we got a little extra distance for our entry fee! And Merrell may come out to do the same shoe testing offer at Brainy Day next year which would be EPIC!


PS I also won a children's bike from one of the raffles I entered! And I never win anything.  Just goes to show you should never say never!
Vern Out

Porta....

I know they are called Portajohns and we've all frequented them at races from Maine to Alaska, Hawaii to Puerto Rico and presumably everywhere in between. Although we haven't run a race in any of those places yet, we know when we get there, the races will certainly provide portajohns!  The point is, I know their real name, porta-john, or outhouse, for the redneck or country folk like myself. Nonetheless, I have gone and renamed them porta"God"s and it is meant as a compliment, not as an inappropriate use of the Lord's name.  Here is how this came to be and I by no stretch of the imagination expect my other half (Mird) to support this! Today is all crazy Vern!   Mird is innocent and sane!


A couple weeks ago I was waiting in the frigid, windy, cold for the start of the  231 Race.  Dressed in nothing more than a tank top and shorts, I was possibly inappropriately dressed for the day's breezy, brisk, autumn weather. Many people expressed concern for the combination of my outfit and the ambient air temperature. They were concerned of the possibility of frost bite on my extremities on this particular outing. However, I felt pretty good about my attire because it was 44 degrees out and I always dress tank top and shorts for any temperatures above 40;  The way I figured it, I had 4 degrees to spare!

Anyhow given that I was dressed so scantily and the weather was so very bitter cold, I of course needed to go to the bathroom, pre-race style, so I waited in "the line" anxiously bouncing around until it was my turn.  When I was finally up, I sat there on a very unsanitary space, in a very unsanitary place, praying to God to help me get through my latest running commitment (23.1 Kilometers in cold, windy weather possibly inappropriately dressed) both alive and relatively unharmed.  And in that moment I had an epiphany.  Portajohns are my God place. I know it sounds crazy, but to me they are like Church.  I talk to God A LOT in portajohns oftentimes at races, but occasionally at other places as well. I TALK TO HIM A LOT PEOPLE. I probably pray more in portajohns than I do anywhere else on earth to be completely honest. And in these moments of prayer in disgusting portajohns across the great country, I do in fact feel supported and a sense of peace and tranquility come over me.  God shows up-- even in portajohns!  He shows up! And that is why I am going to start calling them PortaGods.  They are essentially gross little portals providing access to His great power and wisdom. It is AWESOME!  For me, PortaGods are the next best thing to dressing up and heading to church on Sunday.

After writing this I feel I should possibly do this...

throw on a portajohn and run a race. I'd be chasing down God in my God place!

PS I was totally warm enough so all you skeptics were wrong, Wrong,WRONG!

That is all,
Vern out

We owned the Windy City

From the Indiana Adventure, you already know we caught the 9:30 train and were in Chicago by eleven in the morning.  What you don't know is the rest of the story so here we go!

After our last post, you all realize we have issues with getting lost.  Our directional challenged-ness is a chronic, life-long, affliction, regardless here is a short lesson on the matter.  Mird once spent over two hours looking for Sleepy Hollow State Park which was less than 20 miles from where she started her journey. While Vern once spent several hours trying to find her way home from a race in Holland...Michigan, not the country and no she didn't live somewhere else. She lived in Nunica which is less than 30 miles from Holland.  It was pretty ugly.  Now these are not facts that either one of us really like to share.  We are not proud to be so clueless when it comes to navigating to new places (or home), but these are true stories.  And there are many other similar stories that illustrate our uncanny ability to get lost (or temporarily misplaced) along life's journey.  Now why does this matter to you!?  Well because... It is nothing short of a miracle that the two of us even made it out of the womb safely with such bad internal compasses and now we've committed to traveling to all 50 states often unaccompanied in order to run these races.  That fact makes the running shoes journey all that more challenging and for us!

When two farm girls who grew up in Fremont, Michigan and have spent the better part of their lives lost in one way, shape or form are suddenly plunked down in the big ole city of Chicago most would probably assume that we immediately panicked and became lost.  If I were you, I sure would. However, you would be wrong.  We actually made it to the McCormick Center to pick up our race packets and then navigated all the way to our hotel without so much as a wrong turn!  It really was impressive especially given our track record!

We caught lunch, rested a little, drank some beer and made it to T Swift with time to spare.  Once again without getting lost.  We did in fact "shake it off" at Taylor's concert and made it back to the hotel about 12:30 am in time to catch 4 hours of interrupted and poor quality shut eye before we were off to the start of Rock n Roll Half Marathon, which we once again found without any trouble!!!

Race Commentary by Vern:
This particular race was a bit of a bust and I have been to a LOT of races so I feel I am able to gauge a good race when I see one.  This wasn't a good one.  If it weren't for the fact that I ran it with my little sister (her first half marathon) and we got our picture taken with the Nestle Bunny at the end, I would have been very disappointed.

Here are my complaints I would write the race director too, but I did that last time I was disappointed with a race and didn't even receive a response which was very upsetting to me so I don't want to put myself out there that way again.

1.  The course was too long and 13.1 is plenty far enough. We didn't need to go for nearly14 miles
2.  The heat advisory was still on so the weather was HORRIBLE for running (I realize the race officials can't control the weather, but they can add additional water stations, or at least have water ready for us at the planned aid stations which they often did not)
 3.  The rock concert every other mile was a complete HOAX.  There were four musicalish shows for us.  FOUR and NONE of them were rock bands.  The first was two overweight men playing a tuba and a saxophone.  The second was a lady with a cello.  Yes just one lady and she was not playing rock music either.  The third was in my opinion the coolest band.  It was a bunch of diverse children playing various culturally diverse percussion instruments.  Again it was not Rock 'n Roll, but I was impressed that the kids:

A.  all played together without fighting
B. didn't pass out from heat exhaustion
C.  were well behaved (at least while we ran  by)

The final band was an actual band of middle aged men playing blues music, not rock and roll.

4.  The party at the end was ridiculous as well.  You would have had to wait hours to get your FREE BEER (we didn't), the band wasn't playing at all during the 45 minutes we hung out.  In fact, we never actually saw a band at the party. I suspect there was no actual ROCK BAND at the Rock n Roll Half Marathon and that is an outrage.

All complaints aside,  the traveling running shoes made the 14ish mile journey, we snapped pictures at the end, the race shirt is one I really like and of course it was another quality adventure of the sisterhood variety.

State Number 3 Illinois

 Chicago July 19, 2015 Rock n Roll Half Marathon 87 degrees and sunny

 and huddled up at the finish with the Nestle Bunny!

Which way did we go!?!?

This past weekend our well-traveled running shoes put on some extra mileage. Unintentionally.  In the woods.  Here's how it all went down.

The kids and I were camping with Mird and her kids at their cabin near Standish Michigan with a bunch of other extended family members of Mirds' in-laws. It is a Labor Day tradition for her and I was just substituting for Mark who was drinking beer in Germany and also touring farms mind you! (another story another day).  Anyhow, Mird's brother-in-law was sleeping innocently and happily in his bed as were ALL of the children. We are smart.  We know when opportunity is knocking and that morning it definitely knocked- on the door of our running shoes' closet-- urging them to head out on the trails!   So we decided to sneak out at the butt crack of dawn and go for a quick run.  Harmless enough right!?

The plan was to return before anyone else woke up.  We didn't even leave a note as to our whereabouts because we planned to be gone about a half an hour.  It was roughly 6:40 so the plan seemed reasonable. And it was in fact reasonable, until we got lost.  We spent a little over an hour wandering aimlessly through the great forested area that surrounds her family's cabin.  We were definitely off-roading it on this adventure!  We stumbled upon a camper and were sure we would finally get directions, or at least learn where we were, but nobody was in the camper. It was all locked up!  We also found a barn-like, house or garage and again no people associated with it. Things were not looking up at this point in the run and Mird was getting nervous because there was a family wedding at noon;  if we were truly lost and a search party was sent to find us, that would really mess up the nuptials.  As we pondered our situation and jogged along in hopes of finding some landmark, house or path that would somehow direct us, we became more and more concerned about the wedding and our ability to survive in the woods unassisted.  But our shoes ran on!

Alas, we continued on in search of assistance navigating home.  A short time later, we stumbled upon a house and more importantly a guy smoking a cigarette on the porch of that house. Generally I would try to educate someone about the many dangers of smoking, but given our situation, we decided to forego health class and get directions instead.  After a short conversation with the smoker dude, we learned that we were about 3 miles from the cabin.  In order to avoid a repeat on our adventure, we stuck to the roads from that point on.  I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, but we actually flagged down a car and hitched a ride home.  This is the first time I have ever done this in all of my running years.  It was all in the name of responsibility, love and motherhood! If there is one thing more important in this world than running, it is family and we really wanted to get home to them so they didn't worry needlessly, or send out a search party and ruin the wedding.  We arrived home just as everyone was awakening and snacking with Uncle Glen so truly it was all okay!

 BUSTED 

Post sneaky run mug shot! 

 The Traveling Shoes!

This is what we learned:

 but we were definitely lost!  

Ironically this very sign hangs in the bedroom that I slept in all weekend long!

Standish MI September 7, 2015!  It doesn't count for a state, or a race, but it definitely counts as an adventure of the running variety with my sister and that is more important than any race in the whole entire world!  We owned the woods!

PS  Vern wrote this one for Mird! So thanks. Mird, for the weekend adventure and the clean pair of underwear!

Indiana or Bust!

So you might think since we live in Michigan the next state we would embark on would be the mitten state, but you would be so wrong.  The next adventure saw us all, Amazing Race style and deciding on a complete whim (en route to Illinois to go to Taylor Swift concert and run the Chicago Rock and Roll Half Marathon mind you) to sign up last minute for a trail run in Michigan City Indiana!  This too was a great adventure! And while most people would consider it crazy to run a 5k trail run less than 24 hours before planning to run a half marathon oh and remember with a T Swift concert sandwiched in between, we really embraced the opportunity to be carefree, spontaneous and half way crazy!

We literally pulled into the train station that morning intending to catch the early train, called Mird's husband to have him see if there was a race in the area (because we are both old school in that we dont have smart phones) learned there was one 4 miles away, drove at lightning speed (but within posted speed limits) to get there, changed in the parking lot of the school, ran the race in less than thirty minutes and returned to catch the 9:30 train! We were in Chicago before eleven!  It was EPIC!

Check it out!  And we even won first and second place in our age group!  And they even mailed us our medals because we didn't have time to wait around for the awards ceremony!  Ain't nobody got time for that!

PS The humidity was beyond horrible for this one and there were heat advisories informing people to stay in air conditioning unless absolutely necessary to get out.  This was necessary!  This is a great memory! This is the sisterhood of the traveling running shoes in action.

State Number Two Indiana Super Heroes 5K Trail Run July 18, 2015 Michigan City, Indiana

Mird and Vern Out

THE PACT

The Pact:  50 states. 50 races.  2 sisters.  1 goal.

Survival!!!

To survive (and complete) a race in all 50 states; you know before we die so this is totally a bucket list item!  We are already up to 4 with minimal effort so I totally think we will get there. Hopefully while we are still young enough to remember the journey!  Now you might think this is crazy.  Perhaps.  But for the record, I disagree completely.  There are marathon maniacs out there running marathons in all 50 states or folks running 50 miles in one day for like 12 or 13 hours straight.  Those people are crazy with a capitol C.  Us we're just half crazy!  This journey is just fun, adventurous and a good reason to be healthy and travel the good old U S of A.

The Cast:

Mird is the younger sister by six years, but who is counting!?  She lives with her husband and two boys in central Michigan and began her running career in August 2014.  When recently asked why she took up running Miranda said, "to try to be healthier oh and to be like you (Vern).  She used to consider Vern crazy because of her out-of-control running habit, but has since modified her opinion And now only thinks her sister is half crazy and she wants to be just as crazy as her one day!

Vern is the middle child (and middle sister) in the girls family of four siblings. Rebel is the odd boy out and was stuck with all us girls growing up!  Veronica became a somewhat crazy runner about 5 years ago shortly after deciding to stay home with her then 3 children ages 3,1 and newborn (now 9,7,5).  Her running was done out of sheer self preservation people; do you have any idea how tough it is to be home with very young, very needy, children. all. day. long?! Running was her life raft in the rough seas of motherhood.

So Mird and Vern embarked on this mildly crazy adventure in December 2014 during a family vacation in Florida at a 10k race.  It was Mird's first ever 10K and Vern's and Mird's first ever Florida race.  It was groovey baby! Yes, this particular race was a 70's theme Blast to the Past run and we even dressed up for it!  Check it out!

State Number One Florida!!!

New Year's Day 2015 Temple Terrace, Florida 

Blast to the Past 10k

Florida Motto:  YOLO You Only Live Once!

It was the perfect start to our fun running adventure affectionately named,

 "the sisterhood of the traveling running shoes"

So alas this is the end of our inaugural post.  We hope you will follow us on the journey!

Vern and Mird