Think back over your running career. What are your best and worst experiences that you can think of?

My best running experience is pretty easy for me to figure out. Breaking the tape at the Cox Sports Marathon in 2008 gave me my first course record, for which I am very proud.

The race left a lot to be desired, and I ran alone for a good chunk of the race, but I had a lot of fun and have many fond memories from the race. I knew 2 miles into it that I was going to win, despite there being no real evidence to that effect at that early point in the marathon. It was great to validate my confidence in myself and to follow through with my goals.

More importantly, the training for that race was by far some of the best winter training that I had ever done up to that point, and was the heaviest workload that I had managed since graduating from college. It gave me an appreciation of Winter training in Maine and now every year I actually looking forward to next Winter and running the snow for months on end.

My worst experience running is a little more difficult to decide. Even when I've been completely miserable during the run, I have learned something and had a story to tell in my training log afterwards. Even times when I was frozen solid are now looked back on with fond memories.

If I had to choose one, though, my worst experience would have to be one of two worst injuries that I've had.

Tendonitis and a stress fracture in college left me unable to walk for about a month, and while I raced my way back onto the varsity squad by the end of the season I had no emotional investment in the team that season and that was hard to take. I did get a lot of good cross training in, though, and I used that as a base for my first marathon.

My other major injury was a few years earlier, when I fell down the side of a mountain during a cross country race and broke my ankle. The meet fell between the conference and state championships, and was an annual race where we competed against a few of the much larger schools in the state. It rained all morning, and my coach told me that he'd sit the varsity squad if it didn't let up so that we don't get hurt. No sooner said, and the clouds went away.

We got to the park, and the race course was great. Lots of steep hills on trails through the woods. Unfortunately, I stepped on a leaf that must have been hiding a twig or a hole or something, I never knew what.

The next thing that I knew I was sliding down the trail on my face, which I decided was a bad idea so I got my shoulder down and rolled the rest of the way. One of my teammates hurdled me, but 2 or 3 of the guys on the other teams managed to get me with their spikes before I rolled off the course and waited to be taken the rest of the way down the trail.

The worst part of the whole ordeal was that I was looking forward to chatting up a girl after the race that I knew, but she was on the other side of a creek and I couldn't walk.

I refused to admit the ankle was broken for the next few days, since I was convinced that I'd be able to race in the state meet. My elephant foot belied that belief, though. A childhood friend of mine from the opposite end of the state was also injured, so at least we got to hang out and hobble around cheering on our teammates with our crutches.