Training Buddies

As we all work toward our training goals, we slog out countless hours by ourselves alone with nature or accompanied by the music in our headphones.  Personal motivation is the key to accomplishing any goal, but it sure helps to have people with you along the way.  Workout buddies motivate us, ensure we get our butts out of bed in the morning, make the miles/time fly by and best of all, enrich our lives.  I've been fortunate to have great training buddies along the way- Kevin Moon at George School, Libby Macartney and Nancy Byrne at Millbrook School, Tom Kaegi and Dave Paulsen earlier in Williamstown and Anne Marie Swann and Christy Abel, among others, more recently.  Here's a little bit about some of them:

If you want people to model your life after, look no further than Steve and Elizabeth St. Claire.  They're Williams grads in their early 50's and they're complete bad-asses.  Marathoners, triathletes, golfers, they do it all together and with a level of enthusiasm and joie de vivre that infects those around them.  Truth be told, I haven't done much with them at all but simply knowing they're out there is motivation in itself.  Elizabeth is training for her first Half Iron in September and Steve will join her.  They're on board for Iron Day and have been supportive since day one.  We went for an open water swim last week and will get in a few more of those in the coming weeks.


Trust me, you want to be Elizabeth or Steve St. Claire

 Another person who is all in for Iron Day is Christy Abel.  Christy is an athletic trainer, mom to three adorable kids and wife of Rob Abel, Williams '91.  She's a multiple time marathoner, currently training for the Montreal Marathon in late September and an amazing companion on the long training runs we've both needed to endure.  She's planning to do all 26.2 with me on Iron Day and will be invaluable to my survival on many fronts (I mentioned she's an athletic trainer, right?).  Funny story.  Last week, we ran 19 miles on a muggy, warm morning.  At the end, she was leading me through a couple hamstring stretches.  First couple went fine then she said to try a different one.  I went to do the stretch and my hamstring immediately seized up- I let out a yelp and was hopping around on one leg trying to make the cramp go away.  This was obviously quite funny to Christy who started laughing.  Pretty hard.  Until the muscles in her rib cage started to seize up and cramp.  This was obviously quite funny to me so I started laughing and my muscles seized up, too.  So here we are laughing hysterically while shouting "ow, ow, ow, ow"- wish we had it on video.

Christy and Brooks before a 19 mile run