Cross Runner's Heart

Happy Mother's Day!  Thanks for believing!  Growing up on the farm meant lots of barnyard time and playing any type of game my brothers and I could come up with.  My older brother, Phil, was a relentless competitor.  I don't exactly remember if it was soccer or kickball that led to my front tooth being knocked out but I think the story goes like this: I  pitched a ball to Phil and he was ready to knock it out of the park.  Instead, that ball came back to me.  Straight at my face.  I remember feeling something fly out of my mouth.  My ever so caring brother came over to investigate.  "Dude, you chipped your tooth".  Me: "I didn't chip my tooth, you did!"  Anyways, this is the type of shenanigans that my parents enjoyed growing up with three boys.   After my tooth incident, my mother was truly caring.  We went to the dentist, and since I already had two big buck teeth, and one was chipped, I guess it made sense just to shave both of them bad boys down.  It

We managed to get Juliana and Noah off to bed early on New Years Day.  I was excited to see an email inbox full of Heart Warrior Half Marathon participant finisher photos and comments but too overwhelmed to check them.  A rare occasion, we instead decided to watch a movie and I almost made it through the whole thing before falling asleep, which would have been even more rare.  I had seen  Something the Lord Made  before.  A true, inspirational story that details the work of researchers at Johns Hopkins on congenital heart disease (CHD).  During this era (mid 1900's), the heart was an organ that was notorious for causing complications if disturbed.  The latin phrase,  noli me tangere was   commonly used among cardiothoracic surgeons-- meaning, do not touch the heart during surgery.  The surgeons that broke conventional thinking, developed techniques that gave children a chance at life.  Today, the same surgical principles and shunts have been improved and exist in thousands of card

A black ice start! The freezing rain peppered my windbreaker jacket and my running shoes slid a little bit with each step down the driveway.  It's New Year's Day 2021, day of the Heart Warrior Half Marathon!   WHY  would I decide to do something crazy like this? It seemed like a good idea last Fall, when we had beautiful running weather here in Ohio. Everything was uncertain in 2020`, so I should have expected that we would be confronted with some of the most challenging weather a runner can face for this event.   With my earbuds paired to my phone, I joined a call to my running friend, Matt, a college teammate with whom I have shared thousands of miles.  He was running the Heart Warrior Half Marathon virtually that day and we decided to link up for the first time by phone during a run together.  During our runs, our topics of conversation have greatly varied over the past couple decades.  We no longer have the same discussions that one would imagine two college kids would have