Where are you from? Knoxville, TN
How long have you lived in the area? I moved here in 2011 for math grad school at UNC and stayed until 2015. We moved to Seattle with a 4 week old (NOT recommended) in July 2015 and returned to the Triangle in July 2017. Fellow pub runner Ed Billings helped us buy our house in Chapel Hill!
What are three words your friends would use to describe you? Driven and focused on her goals, obstinately stubborn, insatiably curious and easily excited by data and information. ^^^Hey Katherine.. that's more than 3 words. 😉
Why do you run? I love to be outside, first and foremost — dappled sunlight is my favorite nature feature. I ran my first 5K in the third grade when I made a wrong turn in a one mile fun run at the Race for the Cure, ran cross country and track in middle and high school, and the longest break I’ve taken from running since I was eight was when I broke my left foot as a senior in high school (don’t run on stress fractures...they can act like fault lines...). I have long enjoyed that feeling that entirely under my own power running can take me to any place and any frame of mind I want to reach.
Why did you decide to join the Station Pub Run? I ran on Mondays and Wednesdays at Fleet Feet across the street (including through 32 weeks of my first pregnancy!) before we moved and heard that while we were away all of our favorite people migrated across the street...Also, Steph is awesome, and anything she organizes had to be fun.
What is your favorite thing about the Station Pub Run? I value the opportunity to meet different kinds of people outside my usual zone of interaction and feel completely comfortable talking to them and learning about/keeping up with their lives through our runs. I’m a high school math teacher, mom to one son who will be three this summer and another son-on-the-way, and Pub Run allows me to talk to everyone from college students to grandparents who all have this running thing in common. Veteran parents have given me great parenting advice, people without kids kindly tolerate my massive lime green jogger stroller, and the entire group affords me an outlet when I need an evening of adulting away from playing teacher and mom.
Describe the most recent (appropriate 🙂 ) photo you took with your phone: My son at the Knoxville Zoo with my dad this weekend.
What is the best piece of advice you ever received, and who gave it to you? My dad told me and my two younger sisters that he wanted us all to be astronauts when we grew up so we would “shoot for the stars!” My dad is a combination of unrelenting high expectations tempered by playful humor and inescapable optimism. He gave me the gift — particularly as a young woman — of believing I could be whoever I wanted to be.
If you could have any talent or skill in the entire world, without needing to practice and money was no limitation, what would it be? The ability to make days longer and nights shorter. I’m a bad sleeper, enthusiastic morning person, and hate the dark.
Tell us something about yourself that not many people know: I was the female Presidential Scholar from the state of Tennessee (no one tell my students!) after making a perfect score on the ACT in high school (don’t tell them that either!).
What is something you have done recently, or are about to do, that you are proud of? I am halfway pregnant (20 weeks!) this week, and I am both still running and still breastfeeding my 2.75 year old son. Breastfeeding has been a hugely important part of being a mother for me, and I’m so very proud of being a breastfeeding and working mom even as my first son has aged into toddlerhood. My goal is to let each of my sons self-wean whenever they are ready for that, understanding that experience might be different for each of them.
Please share your favorite quote or slogan: Not a quote...but my favorite poem is by Rudyard Kipling and follows his short story “The Elephant’s Child” in the Just So Stories:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
I know a person small
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes
One million Hows, Two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
Anything else you’d like to share with us?! My parents met their freshman year at Carolina, and though we’re all from out of state and I went to Dartmouth for undergrad, I considered myself a Tar Heel born and bred even before I married a NC-native and signed up to spend my life here.
