I have been a runner since I was 13 or 14 years old. Essentially, I have been a runner twice as long as I have not. I was told that I was not an athletic kid. I was horrible at competitive sports and I hated any and all sports other than figure skating. I now know, that I WAS an athletic kid. I just never had anyone to foster or support that ability. In truth, I was always encouraged to be less than my peers. When I was around 8 or 9 years old, I won my first track event. It was the only sporting event that I would ever win. Instead of being congratulated, I was told not to talk about it. I wasn't supposed to win. Someone else was. For reasons that I did not understand as a child, and reasons that I still don't really understand now. This was a theme that carried throughout my entire adolescence. And so, I gave up. I stopped trying. As soon as I got close to winning at anything physical, I backed off and let the other person win.

At 13, I started running. On my own. I would run at the track while no one was there, I would run the streets in my neighborhood. I began to love to run. It became my release, my therapy. It became one of the only times that I could clear my head and truly focus. I ran almost everyday.. for the next 15 years for myself, by myself. The year I turned 30, I ran my first half and then full marathon. I placed 3rd in my division in each. For the first time in almost 20 years, I was good at sports! I was strong, I was fast. I could win. And it was addicting. Over the next 5 years, I ran 15 marathons and several shorter races. I had one goal, finish in under 3 hours and qualify to run Boston. All this time I had believed that I was weak and unathletic. Now I knew, I was wrong. Everyone who told me that I wasn't athletic or bad at sports, they were all wrong.

Fast forward to 2011. I had been suffering for the last 4 years from a pretty debilitating digestive disorder. I had been to several doctors and specialists without a diagnoses. I was never really being seen or heard by any of them. I was also working a pretty physically demanding job at the time. In spite of all of this, I was still running. I had qualified for the New York Marathon and I was training all the time. Working 50-70 hours a week and running up to 100 miles a week. In the spring of 2011, my stomach condition had grown bad enough that I was forced to miss work for the first time in the 9 years that I had been there. I finally found a doctor who listened to me and was eventually able to find a diagnoses. Part of his treatment was to quit running. I was determined to run in New York in November, so I decided that that part of treatment would need to wait, but maybe I could begin to at least train less and find something else to keep me active and strong. So I began looking for other things that I could do. Fast forward to July 29th, 2011, I walked into my first Yoga class! It wasn't actually my first yoga class. I had taken yoga in college, and I had done yoga videos as a teenager etc. This was my first REAL yoga class. This was the class that would change the entire course of my life.

I had gotten off late that night. I was rushed and determined to make it to the yoga class. So when I got home, I hurriedly went inside to change and rushed out the door. What I didn't realize at the time, was that I had left my work laptop inside of my work truck. That work truck would get broken into that night and the laptop would be stolen. Because of the stolen laptop, I would lose my job of almost 10 years, two weeks later. I was devastated. I was unemployed, physically and emotionally exhausted and still very sick from my digestive disorder. I went to yoga everyday for the next 4 months. I slowly began to rebuild myself. I was receiving medical treatment, I was sleeping for the first time in years and I had found something that I truly loved. Yoga was giving me the same clear headed focus that running did. It became my new therapy. In a way that running had begun to fail to do. I began to HEAL. I was happy, my hair had stopped falling out, the stomach aches that would cause me to double over in pain, had begun to disappear. Once again I felt strong. I began to trust my body again. From the moment that I stepped into the studio on the night of July 29th, I knew that I had fallen in love with yoga. I ran New York, and then decided to take 6 months off of running. I eventually began to work at that very same yoga studio. In 2014, I completed my first yoga teacher training and began to work full time as a yoga teacher.

The journey hasn't been easy. For years I was teaching 30 classes a week and working various part time jobs. My stomach began to improve, but I learned that unfortunately, while treatable, my condition is not curable. Yoga has been key to managing my health.. and my sanity. I was given a tremendous gift the day I walked into yoga. I have been blessed to meet some truly amazing and inspiring people on this journey. Many of my clients will be people that I will cherish knowing for the rest of my life. I have worked my butt off to continue my education and become a Yoga Therapist. Two years ago, I left my birth home and moved to Mexico to live for 5 months. Covid had allowed me to move my private clients and classes fully online, so living abroad and teaching had become gloriously possible. Now as I write this, I am sitting in my bedroom in Patagonia, Argentina. I will never stop continuing my yoga education. It has been such a huge gift to my health and life that I want to share it to anyone I can. I still run, although I will probably never go back to running as much as I did, I still hope to do at least one more full marathon.