On Run Amok Tours, we’ll have lots of time to get to know each other. Running 26.2 miles and sharing conversations over coffee or adult beverages tends to do that. But until we meet, here’s a little background on your erstwhile tour guide, yours truly.

The travel bug bit me in my early 20s, when my husband and I went to Oxford and London for a visit. I was instantly smitten with everything about travel – the plane ride (full disclosure: I actually LIKE airplane food – and usually on international flights, we get a lot of it!), the people, the landscape, the architecture, the history (I was never very interested in history until I found myself sitting in the pub where JRR Tolkien penned the Lord of the Rings). We ultimately returned to Oxford for three years, where I acted as de facto tour guide for the nearly constant flow of visiting friends and family members, and the longer I stayed, the wider my head and my heart opened to the wonder and endless fascination of the globe. Since then, I’ve taken every opportunity to hop on planes to Europe, Asia, and Central America. I spent 5 months in Guangzhou, China learning traditional Chinese medicine. The rest of the time I traveled around – sometimes with a friend, occasionally alone, often with tour groups. I always preferred the connection and camaraderie of being around like-minded people, and found that my traveling companions added depth and breadth to the experiences. I've made lifelong friendships with some of those fellow travelers.

And where does running fit into all this? I haven’t always been a runner - I didn’t start running until my early 30s. I was overweight, out of shape, depressed over the death of my sister. One day I saw a jogger and thought, maybe running a marathon would be a good way to relieve some stress and lose some weight. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing, and as I hobbled across the finish line of my first marathon I thought to myself “I’m never doing THIS again”. And in fact it was almost a full year until I started running regularly again.

What changed for me was finding others with similar goals and dreams but also with varied experiences. I realized how universal running is, and connecting with others made it seem much more worthwhile. Since then I’ve run 17 marathons from California to Boston to Reykjavik to Dublin, and my world has expanded exponentially. Run Amok Tours has grown from the alchemy of these two passions of mine. Running gives us a common language with people we’d otherwise never meet; a common goal that we strive for; “marathon” and “finish line” are universal concepts.