Greetings!
We’re Lisa and Alan, endurance enthusiasts (age-groupers) living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We’ve run many marathons, a few ultramarathons, and have recently taken up the sport of triathlon.
Lisa (“The Penguin”)
Unlike Alan, I didn’t grow up with an athletic background. As a first generation immigrant to Canada, and as one of four children, my family simply didn’t have the economic means. Instead, I grew up with my nose buried in books from the public library, which undoubtedly led me to my current career in communications.
It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I took a serious interest in sports, joining a kung fu class with my younger brother. I spent the next 15 years immersed in martial arts. It was actually one of my classmates who encouraged me to take up running. I completed my first 8 km race shortly thereafter and have never looked back.
I’ve long identified as a “penguin” runner – one of the back-of-the-packers that runner and author John Bingham wrote so prolifically about in his Penguin Chronicles. With the addition of swimming and cycling to our lives, I continue to scuffle, shuffle, and otherwise muddle through the sport, alongside my much more agile and athletic husband, the “gazelle.”
Alan (“The Gazelle”)
First of all, I want to say that I don’t consider myself a “gazelle,” and I don’t consider my wife a “penguin” or my “pudgy sidekick.” These were names that she came up with. I’m just a middle-of-the-pack triathlete, and on good days, a slightly better than middle-of-the-pack runner. But I guess among all of the runners currently living in our house (two), I would be the “gazelle.”
I played several sports when I was younger, but never excelled in any of them. I didn’t start running for the sake of running until 2008, shortly after I met my wife, Lisa, who at that time had already completed a few marathons. Since then, I’ve run races from 10 km up to 50 km.
In 2015, I began focusing more on triathlon. I started with a sprint distance, then worked my way up to an Olympic, a couple of half iron distance races, and then in July 2017, I completed my first full Ironman. This had always been a dream of mine. I grew up in Penticton, B.C. and would watch Ironman Canada every year. My parents used to billet professional triathletes from other countries, and it was exciting to see them compete at such a high level. But it was just as awe-inspiring to see the regular age-groupers pushing themselves for up to 17 hours to complete this race.
Lisa wrote many of the older posts on this blog (for other audiences, in years past), but you can expect to read more of Alan’s work starting in 2018.
