September was a pretty busy month of work travel for me. I was up in Boston for training right after Labor Day, and last week I was in Salt Lake City presenting at a conference of government web folks.


Boston skyline at night

One of the best parts about travel is that I get the chance to run in a new place. I'd been to Boston before, but my trip there this year happened to coincide with some really lovely running weather.

On my first morning there, I planned a run that started along the Charles River and looped me past the memorial for the Boston Marathon bombing victims.



Running down Boylston Street felt like a special experience since I'm slow and may never actually get to do it during the race. As I approached the marathon finish line, I stopped at each of the memorials to take some time to reflect. It's still hard to believe what happened in Boston that day. How you can be at a race to cheer on friends, family or complete strangers and how such a hateful act could shatter that sense of excitement and anticipation in minutes.

It was a somber run, but I was glad I made the time to see the memorial.

My second run in Boston I followed the river the whole time. It was a perfect morning, and it was the first time I ran four miles with no walk breaks in a really long time. It was such a positive run and left me in a good mood the rest of the day.



Salt Lake City was a completely different running experience for me. The city is about 4,000 feet above sea level, and I have never run at any sort of altitude before. I set out to do three miles on my first morning in town, and boy was it tough.

It was about a mile from my hotel to Temple Square, and I used that as an opportunity to take some pictures and stop and catch my breath.



The giant temple looked really majestic in the early morning sunlight.



I did a loop around the complex and then ran back down Main Street to my hotel. It was the perfect way to explore part of the city since I knew I'd be spending a lot of my time in the hotel conference center.



Utah is now another state I can add to the list of places I've run.

I don't have any more trips planned for a bit, but I loved the ability to explore new places this month.

Ack! We're half way through September and I still haven't shared my August reads! Such a fail! After a super solid month of reading in July, August fell back to normal rates.

I finished five books. Most of them I only gave three stars on Goodreads, but there was one 4- and one 5-star book to round out the month.

5 Stars

Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin
I loved this book. It's the fictionalized story of the couple forced to run the Ritz hotel and cater to the Nazis living there during the Germany occupation of France during WWII. The chapters alternate being told from the perspective of the Frenchman Claude and his American wife Blanche -- so you clearly see the impact the occupation has on them, their relationship and the staff they employee at the Ritz.

4 Stars

Summer of '69 by Elin Hilderbrand
I loved this book that was a story born out of the author and her twin brother's own birth in the summer of '69. This story follows a family that has spent every summer together on Nantucket. But this year a son is in Vietnam, a daughter is spending the summer on Martha's Vineyard working her first job, another is pregnant with twins in Boston. Only 13-year-old Jessie is stuck on the family trip to Nantucket. The story is told from the perspective of the women as they deal with the challenges of the world and their own lives in the summer of '69.

3 Stars

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner
I enjoyed this book, but didn't love it as much of some of Jennifer Weiner's other books. I'm not sure if it was because I kind of read it in weird chunks of broken up time and never really had a chance to sit down and enjoy it.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
I don't know if I liked this book or was frustrated by this book, but it left me with thoughts -- and I guess that counts for something. The book follows three different women over the course of their lives -- all are unhappy with at least some, if not many, aspects of their lives. I overall enjoyed reading about the women, but I think the ending left me disappointed. I wanted something more -- some deeper analysis, some thought-provoking conclusion that Taddeo come upon in her 8+ years of research for this book. That's mainly what I found lacking. What was the point of what I just read? It was largely depressing and I wanted some deeper analysis into why that was.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
This book was kind of weird, but I read it in one sitting while lounging by the pool. I appreciated the flashback to kids involved in theater in high school and all the drama that can go along with that. I didn't love when half way through, the book took a weird turn and changed narrators and got real ambiguous. It felt weirdly jarring.

As always, if you have book recommendations, leave them in the comments!

If you've been reading any time in the last several years, you may have sensed that running and I have been on the outs. After a series of injuries, followed by grad school, followed by more injuries, I have struggled to find the joy in running that I used to.


Back when running was fun

There was a span of years in the early 2010s where I readily spent large parts of my discretionary income on race entry fees. I was in half-marathon shape pretty much year round, meaning if a friend said, "Hey do you want to run a race with me in two weeks," I could very easily say yes.

I pulled myself out of bed at 4:30 a.m. regularly to log miles before work. Running was fun and easy, and I made it a priority.

But as injuries piled up, running stopped being fun. I was so annoyed that every time I started to finally find a running grove again, I ended up hurt. So I let running stop being a priority and focused my time and energy on other things.

A few days ago, I went with my good friend to see Brittany Runs a Marathon. The movie is a comedy loosely based on a real-life runner named Brittany who started running because she wanted to get in better shape.



In the movie, Brittany's doctor tells her she needs to lose something like 55 lbs to not be considered obese according to the BMI chart. After at first ignoring the doctor's advice, Brittany convinces herself to just run around the block once.

She does that a couple of times, and then her neighbor invites her to join her at the local running group. The neighbor is very in shape, but Brittany befriends another back-of-the-pack runner and the three new friends make a pact to run the New York City Marathon.

Marathon training has a lot of emotional ups and downs and Brittany and her group of friends experience most of them. The movie made me laugh, and it made me cry. It also made me very mad at fictional Brittany's poor life choices. But most importantly perhaps, the movie reminded me of all the good things about running.

I've been working on reestablishing my own running routine, and the movie was the perfect reminder of all the things I used to love about running -- the community, the challenges it provides, the ability to be outside enjoying gorgeous weather.

I'm hoping I'll be able to find all those things again with my own running soon. In the meantime, I'll just keep telling everyone how much I loved this movie.

P.S. Runner's World has a good story on the the real-life Brittany.