Wow, was it great to be back in Chicago! My sister and I went down to the city for Easter weekend and took the opportunity to run through Grant Park and the Lake Front Trail. I started training for distance races about nine months ago, so I never ran in downtown Chicago when I lived in the city. Now I realize what I missed! The day was a gorgeous (though cloudy) with temps in the 50s. For two girls coming from 30 degree weather in Wisconsin, it was heaven! Below are some of my favorite pictures from the run (and some of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books):

“You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

“That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.”

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”

“…there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love [running]. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you’ve got, being patient and forgiving and… undemanding…maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.”

“The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other,… but to be with each other.”

― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

Where is your favorite running or cycling destination?

Ciao!

Sarah