WHADDUP.
My name is Robin and I am a 26-year-old resident of Baltimore, MD. I graduated from Dickinson College in 2014 with a Bachelors degree in math and computer science, and now work downtown as a government contractor analyzing data, creating reports, and troubleshooting database issues. Data analysis pays the bills, but my true passions lie elsewhere: long distance running, seeing the world, and traveling to new and exciting places to run long distance races in them.
I won’t lie to you. I won’t sit here and say “I was running before I could crawl,” or “I knew I loved traveling when I was a fetus and my mom first took me abroad.” No. These were not inherent passions. Let’s talk about some of my earliest memories of each one.
Runnin’: My mother, who has been a runner since high school, signed the two of us up for a two mile race in Denver when I was about six. I think the longest we ran without stopping was one hundred yards. “Let’s stop,” I said every thirty seconds, looking at the flowers, the sky, thinking about what snacks I wanted to eat later. My mom walked beside me restlessly, wringing her hands and rolling her eyes. “I guess Robin isn’t going to be a runner,” she thought. We were the very last two people to finish that race. Everyone at the finish, probably having been finished for hours themselves, clapped politely as we came through. I didn’t run another race for almost ten years.
Roamin’: When I was a few years old and my sister was just a tot, we went with our mother to Lima, Peru, where our grandparents came from and where we still have a great abundance of family. We went to a birthday party. I slid down a slide and landed on my pinkie toe wrong. I screamed and screamed and screamed. We went to the beach. My mother left me with my scary great aunts and went into the ocean, and I screamed and screamed and screamed as I watched her get farther and farther away and as sand stung me in my eyeball. I didn’t ask to go back to Peru for another fifteen years.
I was not a perfect child. I was frequently whiny, bratty, and self-centered, in constant need of attention. I have always been on the shy side, and have let fear dictate a lot of my existence. I don’t deny this. I won’t deny that I was sheltered, a late bloomer. It took me a while to get where I am today, to discover who I am and who I want to be, to figure out what it is that really makes me happy. In an ideal world we’d all come into existence fearless, passionate, driven, and a reflection of the person we will become.
But life is about growth. It is about pushing ourselves to discover what we are capable of, and molding ourselves into better people year after year. And what better way to push yourself to your limits, to figure out who you truly are and what you’re truly made of, than by running farther than you think you can go and traveling to places you’ve never been before? Running and traveling make me a better person, and for that I love them both. You don’t have to be the most outgoing, fearless, and enviously free-spirited person to live a life of adventure that you love. You just have to be willing to push yourself.
After discovering my love for running about 12 years ago after wandering nervously onto the cross country team at my high school, and my love for travel only a handful of years ago (after not being able to study abroad due to my second computer science major that I tacked on at the last minute), I have devoted myself to them. Life is too short to not pursue what you love, to allow yourself be consumed by a career that fails to excite you. In June I spent the night in urgent care with a stress headache so bad that I couldn’t do anything but lay in bed, nauseous and numb. It was a wake-up call for me. My job is predominantly work-from-home, and this gives me the flexibility to do what I love from wherever I want, and my goal is to ultimately be able to work remotely 100% of the time.
I hope that you will join me in my journey through life, and will enjoy reading about races I encourage you to run, countries I encourage you to visit, experiences I encourage you to have. Runnin’ and Roamin’ is a place to document my adventures in running as I work to run 50 marathons in 50 states (plus a DC marathon, of course), in my travels around the country and around the world on my way to crossing everything off my bucket list, and in just being with my beautiful family (each of whom is my best friend) and my chihuahua child (Stella, my baby). Life is short, and I’m trying so hard to always make it fun!
