They say the bond between twins [1] is unlike any other. From day one, my sister Carla and I have shared everything from rooms to clothes and classes. Today, at 30, we share a love of long-distance running [2].
Although neither of us was very athletic when we were young, we both decided to join our high school's track and cross-country teams during our junior year. This helped us adopt healthy fitness routines we kept up with throughout our college years, and during our final semester of our senior year, we ran our first half-marathon [3] in New York City and did several short local races together before I moved back to our hometown of Houston in 2011.
Although we have signed up for many races together, we've only run one side by side from start to finish (the 2013 New York City Marathon). It's usually every girl for herself when the gun goes off, and we've both had the honor of beating the other many times over, sometimes by several minutes. But funnily enough, most of our personal best times are within seconds of each other and have been run at separate races.
While we haven't gotten to regularly train together since beginning to live in different cities, the majority of our trips to visit each other have revolved around doing a race. She now lives in Chicago, so it's pretty easy to find a good time for a running-related visit when she's ready to escape her city's Winter and vice versa with mine's Summer.
One of the best parts about sharing this love for running is that neither of us will bat an eye at the other one wanting to get a run in during vacation [5], and we understand the importance of all the little things that surround race preparation, from going to bed early to carb-loading up at dinner, and, especially, finding a great brunch spot afterward. And although we both know that at the end of the day it's "just running," we can each sympathize and share the disappointment with the other when one of our races doesn't go as planned and one of us misses a goal. While I do miss seeing and running with my sister on a regular basis, I know we'll share this hobby for many years to come.
