As I slowly dragged one foot in front of the other, I could feel my calf muscles strain and tighten. I was running on relatively flat ground, on black asphalt, but it felt like I was pushing myself uphill. I thought back to the prior few days – a five-hour walking tour around Beijing, an …
At this time next week, I will be in Hong Kong! It’s been a few months since I’ve left the country and this trip has snuck up on me a bit. Running the Great Wall Marathon has been on my bucket list for years and when I started making plans to finally do it, it …
Four weeks from today I will embark on what will be perhaps my greatest physical challenge: running the Great Wall Marathon in China. Sure, I’ve completed seven previous marathons, two of them in temperatures reaching the mid-80s. Sure, I hiked rim-to-rim in the Grand Canyon in temperatures close to 100 degrees. And sure, I hiked …
Sometime in February, I passed the five-year anniversary of this blog. I thought of writing something about it then, but never got around to it, in large part because I just didn’t have the motivation to do so – a feeling that has plagued me quite a bit recently. It’s not that I don’t have …
Wow, has it already been two months since I moved to Washington, D.C.? I generally feel like I have settled in well and gotten into a good routine here. Waking up and doing yoga, walking to and from work, running or going to the gym after work (and still getting home by 7!!). I’ve got …
While my new home of Washington, D.C. was digging out of a massive snowstorm a few weeks ago, I was on the other side of the country, running along the rainy waterfront in Portland, Oregon. My trip to Portland was originally mostly business, but due to the impending storm, I moved my flight up a …
Friday marked one month since I moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C. – my first time living outside of the Midwest in my entire life. Here’s a look at how it’s gone. First up, the move itself. I wasn’t bringing any furniture with me to D.C., so I didn’t think it made sense to hire …
It will be five years ago in August that I quit my job as a fundraiser for a Chicago law school to spend 13 months traveling and volunteering throughout the former Soviet Union. At that time, I wrote about what I might do when I returned. In short, I didn’t really know, but I had …
One foot in front of the other, I told myself. Just put one foot in front of the other. My legs felt like lead as I tried to propel myself forward, relying a little too much on my hiking poles that kept collapsing under the pressure. So many thoughts floated through my head, the most …
“Katie, look! A dik-dik!” “Where?” “Over there.” “Where?” “There.” “I don’t see it, where?” “There, running away into the woods.” “Oh.” And thus went what seemed like the first hour of my “game drive” through Awash National Park, located a few hours’ drive from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. (By the way, a dik-dik is a …
