Runs With Mascara: Taper Time!

Monday, August 15, 2011

Taper Time!

Aloha! Fresh off the plane from Kauai and mid-taper before TransRockies, the lungs are chilling, the feets are resting and the legs are tanning - working up that base for the high altitude exposure. All is good the week before we start. Cheery emails from friends and with Dana, 11th hour purchases - a new pack to hold my camera, a new bra to hold my boobs. Things are coming together and the excitement is tangible. I am ALL confidence at the unknown. We will go, we will finish, we will have fun. 2 of the 3 I know for sure.

(Na Pali Coast where I did not run. I hiked. Quickly. With feeling.)

Fresh off a great long weekend in Kauai paddling an outrigger in the Napali Challenge, my upper body is tight, my lower body loose, and my mind all dialed back into running. Truth be told the weeks between my trips to Bhutan/India and Hawaii were not filled with the usual glowing happy running adventures I generally experience. I was solo a lot and running the same trails just to get the miles in. I mean, in the end you never finish a run and think boo hoo, poor me - there's always the natural high from running 12+ miles at dawn and landing at your desk flush with rosy cheeks and a little dirt around the ankles. (Sometimes you have to make the hard decision between cutting a run short to get a shower in or toweling off in the parking lot and heading to work.) But at times it felt a little more like work and a little less fun.

(No work, no running, no cares. View from edge of Hanae, Kauai.)

But now I am ALL IN and super stoked for the adventure ahead. Even a chill 55 minute run through the city got me excited after a week of no running. The miles are logged, the mascara selected. Soon the bags will be packed and Runs With Mascara will make it's official debut. Shabooya.

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About Runs with Mascara

Who is Team Runs with Mascara?

Runs with Mascara is Dana Katz and Samantha Pinney - training partners and friends for the past 3 years; adventurers with a flair for musicals and running skirts, and a generous respect for looking good when sweating hard. While they’ve had many adventures across the West, one of their more epic spans was a week they spent racing from the Bizz Johnson trail marathon in northern California to rappeling in Arches National Park, to biking the White Rim Trail in southern Utah to running the Moab Half Marathon. This is their first race endeavor as a team under the name RWM.

Samantha Pinney overcame the malls of her New Jersey youth for an obsession with the outdoors that carries her from skiing to ultra running to outrigger canoeing and whatever adventures she can find. She can’t imagine life without running skirts, flip flops or beanies and wields a kettle ball as deftly as she does a mascara wand. She competed in the 2010 Crossfit Team Games, has multiple top 10 finishes to her name but can’t throw a softball to save her life. She’d like to be a better surfer.

Dana Katz is a recovering triathlete and cyclocross racer turned ultrarunner. She eats hills for breakfast that she doctors with homemade concoctions of flaxseed and ginger granola in her ongoing quest to create ridiculously healthy and delicious meals. Dana is a globetrotter who in a recent span ran a ½ marathon in Brazil, a trail run in Sweden, a marathon in northern California and a harried loop amongst the monuments of Washington D.C. before boarding a plane. She doesn’t leave home without her running skirt and snacks. Don’t let Dana’s easy-going, amicable personality fool you: she trains like a warrior and competes with a vengeance.