Sunday, December 22, 2013

Follow Your Heart!

Change is scary.

Kara Goucher wrote in her blog recently about following your heart. She is leaving her current coach and training partners to return to Boulder to finish her elite career with her CU coaches. Much of her decision was based on what felt right.

I read her post a few days after I had signed a contract to work at the International School of Panama. Leaving my home of 22 years and moving to a place where I have only seen pictures of on the internet is a bit overwhelming. It helped to read the words "follow your heart".

Living abroad has always been a dream of mine; then it became a goal for our family.  So all four of us are packing up and moving from the cool Rocky Mountains to the tropics of Panama.

Some days when my youngest child expresses his fear over the move or I get overwhelmed at the amount of work we need to do on our house, I remember we are following our hearts. I am excited for the change to our routine of life, to learn a new language and culture, work in a new school, and leave our comfort zone.

As a runner, I will need to embrace the humidity (easier said than done), switch my mind to kilometers from miles when coaching high school runners from different countries, create a bucket list of road and trail races, and to "run happy" away from the familiar and amazing trails of Colorado.