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| Theodora, Me, Janae, Heather, Katy (stole this pic from Janae!) |
I’ve been having a great time here in Bethlaham, Pennsylvania at the Runner’s World Half-Marathon Festival. I cannot tell how you special and welcome the entire staff of RW has made us bloggers feel.
To be honest, I had no idea they had planned to spend so much time with us but I’ve been honored. On Thursday night, there was a dinner planned with the entire staff to welcome us. We were chatting it up with Editor in Chief David Willey and the amazing Bart Yasso! Bart has been at RW since 1987 and is famous in the running community. He gave us a tour of headquarters and was so full of fun and personality — I loved him!
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| Bart Yasso & David Willey at the welcome dinner. |
We got to peek into he and David’s offices — where the monthly issue magic happens! I was seriously SO impressed by every single person there. Each staff member was extremely friendly and wanted to know all about our blogs and where we were from. I can’t imagine how wonderful it must be to work at such a pleasant place.
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| Bart’s Office |
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| David’s Office |
Additionally, I truly do love Runner’s World and see the quality journalism they produce each month. It has always been a dream of mine to be published there and I hope someday I can make that happen.
We saw their wall full of every issue plus got to hold the Runner’s World sign. There was a treadmill desk to showcase and more!
It was also fun connecting with new and old blogger friends on Day #1. I had met some of the bloggers in town for the race but not all. I love meeting those I follow on Twitter or through blogging — really brings them to life and gives a whole new understanding to the things you see online.
Monica & Sarah came all the way from California and Janae came from Utah so we have a full stock of states represented. The great thing about bloggers is we never run out of things to talk about and this group has been a blast.
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| Tina, Theodora, Katy, Me |
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| Linda, Ashley, Meranda, Me |
We had a nice dinner and some fun chatting with the RW crew. We were the introduced to Golden Harper, the creator of Altra Zero Drop shoes, which I recently reviewed.
Golden is pretty cool because he ran a 2:45 marathon at the age of 13! He also came up the the cool concept for Altras. The “ltr” in “Altra” stands for “learn to run” and the “Altra” overall is derived from “Ultra” because most of the Altra team run ultra-marathons. Cool!
Basically, Altras look a little boxy because they are shaped like feet. They aren’t “minimal” because your feet aren’t close to the ground but they are zero drop so you are still level. It’s a pretty cool, small business story and I was really intrigued by the info on why this shoe works well to prevent injury and help you to run more naturally. I would really encourage you to check out their website for more information.
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| Janet, Golden Harper of Altra, Toni and Heather |
Of course there was also a little posing with the RW backdrop. With all of us bloggers here, there were tons of photos being snapped at all times!
Okay I’ll stop this post there and stay tuned for MORE tomorrow! I’ve got to fill you in on the 5k & 10k I ran this morning — as well as yesterday’s fun times learning and meeting some pretty awesome new people!
