Saturday, September 27, 2008

Goodbye to a new friend

It is now official-Diana will soon be heading south to Cabo. And while I wish her the best, I will be sad to see her and her family go. They will be there for three years, but are not sure where they will be when they come back to the US. Diana and I have trained together for many months, and have become friends in the process. Our religious beliefs are miles apart-she is Mormon, I am Catholic. We have had many discussions on our runs of our differences and similarities. I have been able to ask her questions that I could have never asked anyone else. She is such a wonderful person and a great mom to her children. It has been nice to start my days with our early morning conversations about everything that is going on in our lives. I've given her the whole synopsis of the Twilight series because she refuses to read the books. We also have had many funny "dog moments". Diana is deathly afraid of any dog.

Diana and I are different in most aspects of our lives, which maybe makes it easy for us to get along. Diana was a CHEERLEADER-one of those words that should somehow have only four letters. She did run cross country and track though-of course, for purely social reasons. So, she has definitely taught me about running for the fun of it and truly made training for our triathlon enjoyable. If I would have trained for it by myself I would have been much more serious and would not have had as much fun. She has told me that she didn't need to be successful running in high school-sorry, I needed to be. Also, Diana is much younger than I. She was kind enough to point out one morning that she was still in high school when I was coaching-thanks Diana! Just rub it in a little more. I have told her that if I was her coach she would have run much faster than she did. Since I didn't get to work her hard when she was in high school, I've been making her work harder now. Diana is also paranoid about running by herself-it doesn't matter what time of day it is. If I didn't meet her, she would run on the treadmill. That has never been a problem for me, but now some of her paranoia has rubbed off. I'm going to be jumping at every movement when I'm running by myself.

Diana is going to be on our "mud run" team. It should be lots of fun. Hillary got together a team of five women for this five mile race in Scottsdale in November. We have to stay together for the whole race-finish arm-in-arm. While trying to race we have to go through boot-camp like obstacles-belly crawl, tire run, climbing over a wall, jumping over hay bales and a mud pit. Who knows what else they will have us do! We brainstormed for our team name yesterday-we are now the Dirty Soles. So we have some training to do before she leaves us for Mexico!

No comments: