It was late March, and I was in peak training for a 50-miler in May. Springtime in Colorado means dodging slush and ankle-deep mud, but there’s one route that usually behaves - Rampart Range Road. Wide, winding, predictable. A place where you can almost always count on solid footing and far fewer tantrums about mud bricks forming on your shoes. I remember starting that run with this quiet hunch that it was going to be a good day. The sky was perfectly blue. The sun felt warm on my skin even though the wind still carried a chilly winter. 16 miles on the calendar! I’d do 8 miles up, then go full throttle on the 8 miles back down. I’d found my groove - feet tapping into their rhythm, SWAP podcast in my ears - until I came to a screeching stop. Snow? Are you kidding? Here’s the thing. I might be tough - tough enough to run 105 miles through mountains just 6 months earlier - but when the elements challenge me, grit and resilience leave the building, and I will shamelessly choose the path of least resistance every time. So there I was, glaring at the snow, debating my life choices, when a girl came flying down the road toward me - clearly unbothered by the conditions I was acting offended by. Must be nice to be that tough. She reached me right past mile marker 5. I waved her down. She pulled out an earbud - hat, sunglasses, dirty-blonde ponytail, legs for days. “Hey! How long does the snow last?”
“Ummm, maybe about a mile or so?”
“Shoot…okay, I’m gonna turn around. I’m not trying to invade your run or anything, I just hate the snow.” We laugh now because I implied I wouldn’t talk her head off. You can guess how that went. Immediately we fell into a pretty fast stride, almost as fast as the questions I was firing at her. Within minutes, we’d exchanged names, ages, where we lived, what races we were training for, what we did for work, and even what podcast was in our ears. Her name was Katie. She was 31, while calling me “a baby” at 25. She was training for her first 50-mile race. She lived close to the trails. Had her PhD in Psychology. And somehow, we were listening to the same SWAP episode. We talked ultrarunning while basically running a 5K PR. We were doing that unspoken runner thing where each person thinks the other is setting the pace…so nobody slows down…so you both keep subtly speeding up. I remember thinking how fast she was and being impressed. I asked if she had a coach. She didn’t, so I offered to connect her with mine, and she seemed interested. About two miles later, I stopped to tell her I needed to go back up to grab the jacket I’d ditched earlier. I asked for her number to share my coach’s info. And yes, that was my actual reason. Not a smooth pickup line. Though I wish I could claim that story now… My text went green, and for a second I worried she’d given me a fake number. Turns out she just lived in the first century and didn’t have unlimited data. I ran back up, snapped a picture of my jacket to send her a joke about no one stealing it, then headed down alone, secretly hoping I’d catch her again at the bottom. I didn’t, but I excitedly anticipated her text back to me. I already knew we’d be friends. It was something about the ease of that conversation, shared through shallow breaths and accidental tempo running. She was soft-spoken but attentive, curious, warm. Tough in the areas I wasn’t, like running through snow without hesitation. I admired it instantly. There was a cosmic boom on Rampart that day. Two strangers arriving at the same place, at the same time, without knowing how much their lives were about to change. Stride by stride, question by question, falling into something neither of us could have predicted. A future overflowing with love, memories, laughter, and lessons.
A life richer than anything I could’ve imagined.
And a partner who became everything I didn’t even know to dream for - someone who exceeded every quiet hope I’d tucked away, even the ones I never said out loud.