LAURA FINNEY

I remember as a young toddler in the 80s, watching in awe as a runner carried the olympic torch down a long flat road across the plains of Colorado. I admired runners from that day forward. In middle school, I was the dork who couldn't wait until the end of basketball practice because that was the time to RUN! I played around with the thought of taking up cross country in high school, but never thought I could be good enough at it. It wasn't until the Spring of 2007, at the age of 27, that I fully committed myself to becoming a runner. I placed 1st in my age group at my debut 5K in a small Savannah, GA suburb. I was hooked on the competition and sheer love of running from then on! Over the last few years, I had trained myself, and mostly by myself pushing my body to the limits. I had accomplished many PRs in that time and knew running had found me! I also very quickly began paying the price for overtraining myself as I suffered and ran through bilateral stress fractures for almost 2 years. Returning from injury was a very emotional experience for me and knew I needed some help and coaching of someone much more experienced.

I hired Bobby and became pleased with the results right away! His mantra to me is to be patient and allow myself to have "easy" runs, and let the training work itself out. We have discussed all the avenues of the lifestyle changes that are necessary to implement in order for his training to truly benefit me as the runner. He has been so right and I am already benefitting from his experienced wisdom. I very recently set a 1/2 marathon PR by over 5 minutes. We are still in our early stages of training together, but I am completely ecstatic to see where my training may potentially go.