Hi everyone! And an extra special welcome to anyone visiting from the Grow Your Blog blog hop! I participated in the last session as well, and shared the ABCs of Run Away With Me to introduce readers to my blog. I decided to do another introductions post because they’re so much fun! Plus with all of this re-injury stuff that’s been taking over my blog lately, I just needed to do a fun post. This time, I’m focusing on listing my top 3 fun facts in a few categories so you can learn even more about me!
Three fun facts about me:
- I’m 28 years old but sometimes get mistaken for a high schooler when I’m at work
- I’ve been dating my husband for almost 10 years (and will be married 3 years in June!)
- I started running almost 4 years ago
Three places I’ve lived:
- Pittsburgh during college
- Philadelphia
- Anchorage AKA my current home!
Top 3 favorite ways to work out:
- Running (even though I’m currently injured…again)
- Hiking
- Yoga
Top 3 things I love about living in Alaska:
- The crazy amount of amazing running trails in the city
- The mountain views
- The midnight sun in the summertime!
Top 3 favorite pizza toppings (my favorite food!):
- Extra cheese
- Broccoli
- Reindeer sausage (trust me, it’s awesome!)
Top 3 favorite books:
- The Help
- All 7 Harry Potter books
- Half Broke Horses
Top 3 favorite places to visit:
- Bar Harbor, ME
- Seward, AK
- Worlds End State Park, PA
Top 3 favorite TV shows:
- Teen Mom
- Parks and Rec
- Dance Moms
Top 3 biggest achievements in my life:
- Earning my masters degree in special education
- Running my first half marathon 2 years ago
- Making the giant, life-changing move up to Alaska in April 2014
Top 3 things I love about blogging:
- “Meeting” new bloggers online and forming awesome friendships all over the US and Canada!
- Actually meeting bloggers in real life and knowing I have tons of potential running buddies when I travel for a race!
- Writing blog posts. It turns out that I love writing – especially when it’s not for college essays!
I hope you got the chance to learn a little more about me today! Now it’s your turn: share one (or three!) fun facts about yourself in the comments!
Mom in the Mtns 
1. I watch my food while eating
2. After I showered, I have to have to dry my face first, then my left arm and then the rest.
3. I already named my dog which I will buy in around 2 years!
OMG that shower thing – I thought about it, and I think I do the same thing! I have a really strict routine in the shower now that I think about it. So funny!
Great to meet you through the blog hop! Three things about me:
1. I’ve gone dog-sledding and it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done!
2. One of the most amazing and meaningful things I’ve done is hike the Grand Canyon in honor of my dad after he was diagnosed with leukemia.
3. I’ve raised over $10,000 for Team In Training and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
Dog sledding is the best! The Iditarod is next weekend, you should see if you can live stream the start online (I’ll be there!). It’s also amazing how much you have done for your dad and others with Leukemia. Let me know next time you are doing a fundraiser!
fun facts about me? (1)I’m also a Harry Potter fan (I have read the entire series numerous times…more than my kids have) (2)I’m SOOOO envious of all the trails you have to explore (3)I’m pretty good at plagiarizing expensive hand-knit sweaters I’ve seen and making them for myself (but I’ll usually tweak the pattern, to make it “my own”).
That’s amazing about knitting! I wish I could knit my own clothes. I always try to knit and I end up making some pretty ugly and useless scarves 🙂
Great to see you in the blog hop today Kristen! Sorry to hear that you are injured again and not able to run. Broccoli on pizza is the bomb! Oh now I want some
It’s so good! Especially on white pizza. Mmmmm.
Oh this is fun! I too loved Half Broke Horses!
1. I was and still am a huge Laura Ingalls Wilder Fan
2. I’ve never lived anywhere but in the Chicago area. So boring.
3. My biggest accomplishment? Besides giving birth? Finishing the Chicago Marathon. 3 times!
That’s amazing about Chicago! And as a huge history nerd/book reader, I LOVE Laura Ingalls Wilder! I read her books so many times, but it’s been years since I’ve gotten them out. That should be your next book club book (kidding!)
I haven’t seen a single one of those tv shows! I’m not much for reality tv.
We had always agreed we’d go to Alaska for our 20th anniversary. When it rolled around we just looked at each other & said HI! And HI is one of our favorite places in the world; we’ve been 3 times.
But we did go to Alaska after that & it was amazing!
Haha I watch the worst trashy reality TV ever and I love it. But Parks and Rec is really good – if you like Amy Poehler you will like it! I’m pretty sure every season is on Netflix.
Not really an Amy Poehler fan. But I do love Rob Lowe. 🙂 I was so mad when he left the West Wing!
We would not be able to watch tv together. Except for number 2 ;D
Hahahaha! In my office half of us watch trashy reality TV, the other half do not. So after this week’s Teen Mom finale half of us gathered up and talked about what happened while the rest of the office just looked genuinely confused because we were all screaming and freaking out…about some 22 year old girls. So funny. Parks and Rec is great though!
This isn’t about me, but I am curious about Alaska! Have you heard of any good marathons up there? So amazing you live up there!
Yes! We have the Mayor’s Midnight Sun marathon/relay/half/5k on the summer solstice (it’s in the morning, not midnight, but you can stay up until midnight to watch the sun set!) and then we have the Big Wild Life Marathon/ultra/half/5k. Those are our two biggest running weekends for sure. There’s a fall marathon in Kenai, and I think there are some marathons in Fairbanks too, but it’s really hot up there in the summer so I keep all my running in Anchorage 🙂
Harry Potter ❤ ❤ ❤
PS Fun post! I love getting to know you better.
It’s the best! I recently did a big two-day HP movie binge and it was amazing and exhausting. So many sad and terrible things happen in those books that I need to spread it all out!
i hope your injury heals quickly! and you can get back to running. i love broccoli ive never had it on pizza though… looks like ive been missing out
Put it on white pizza! Your life will change. I feel slightly less guilty eating it when it has veggies on top 🙂
Broccoli on pizza reminds me of Inside Out. I’m a Pixar nerd and have seen all but one of their movies.
I’ve neer seen that! Now I definitely have to go check it out!
Hi, Kristen. I love the format of this post! 1) I ran a half marathon in the town where The Help was filmed. Great book! 2) I ran my first marathon after injury, only 4 weeks after being able to run again. I did tons of alternate training though. 3) I’d like to travel to Alaska but will have to live vicariously through you until I do.
You should definitely come up here! We have tons of amazing races all summer (and winter, but they have sucked the last few years because of our lack of snow) long!
Hi! Thanks for the introduction- I’ve been following a bit and it’s always nice to learn more.
1. I’m 25, married, and have a 5 month old daughter. We live in Southeast Texas.
2. I started walking for charity events, then it somehow turned to running. My husband runs so now we run together.
3. I was a semi-vegan before I met my husband who was kosher. He now eats pork but I still refuse. Sometimes he will sneak bacon into the house.
Haha omg! I do this with cheese. We stopped eating it to stay healthy, but now I’m sneaking cheese into my office so I can eat it at work 🙂 I guess we all have that one thing we can’t live without! Bacon is pretty yummy 🙂
I love cheese. Well, I’m lactose intolerant and vegetarian so I dont eat a lot of cheese (hence I call myself semi-vegan; I really only eat butter and eggs). But when I do eat cheese I have to be picky so I don’t get sick. I eat some fancy cheeses.
Hopping on over from the Blog Hop! My legs are already tired and I just got started! I started running in 2012 too and when I started I could not run for the 1 minute in C25K! Thank goodness I kept up with it and this past January I ran two 1st for me, a Disney run and a marathon all in one day! 🙂 Alaska is such a beautiful place, what brought you there? My husband and I talked about wanting to take an Alaskan cruise. I hope one day to make that a reality! Nice to see you through the hop!
We came up here on our honeymoon and had been talking for a while about moving somewhere new, preferably with mountains, snow, and no humidity. When we came here for our trip we were like THIS IS IT! and we moved up here a year after that! It is so amazing living here but really hard to visit family, but we’ve been here almost 2 years now and it’s finally starting to feel like home.
How cool is that I’m so glad you shared that. Truly inspiring. After the kids get out of the house my hubs an I want to travel in our RV full time. So this is very neat to me that you did it!!
Omg we met people on our honeymoon that do that! It’s my dream to do that someday. They had so many amazing travel stories! We drove up here in our jeep super fast (8 days doing 13 hours each day) but I would love to make the drive super slow in an RV someday! It’s the best way to travel Alaska.
That’s exactly what we want to do 🙂
So nice to meet you and get to know you through this post! I’ve never been to Alaska but I’m very curious about what it’s like. The midnight sun sounds incredible!
Alaska is amazing! it’s not what people think it is – for example, we haven’t had any snow in months and it’s like 46 degrees here today. There’s a trend in the past few years of super mild winters, but on average our winters in Anchorage are more mild than the midwest. It’s super dark in the winter and super light in the summer, and it’s absolutely gorgeous! Hopefully you can make it up here sometime!
This is such a fun survey! Fun fact- I went to Alaska last summer on a cruise with my family and didn’t expect to fall in love with the state. The mountains were so gorgeous and I’m determined to go back one day 🙂
Do it! And let me know if you do! It’s such a gorgeous place and it’s so big that it would take forever to see it all.
Love getting to know you better through the blog hop! And broccoli on pizza? I can’t believe I’ve never tried that! Fun fact about me: I’m a personal trainer who has a love-hate relationship with working out – so I became a trainer to keep ME accountable! I’ve never been to Alaska but it sounds BEAUTIFUL!!!
You should try broccoli on white pizza, it’s so good! And I love why you became a trainer! That’s something I would totally do 🙂
After reading your top three tv shows, I’m pretty sure we’d be good friends in real life! I hate to admit it but I love Dance Moms and Teen Mom and I tell everybody that Parks and Rec is pretty much the best show ever.
Haha I almost didn’t put Dance Moms on here (especially because this season is a hot mess), but I’m not here to lie about my life 🙂 I looooove trashy reality TV!
I agree writing for a blog is so much more fun than writing college essays! I like a little trash tv- love the housewives from any city- shhhhh, don’t tell!
Trashy TV is the best!!! It’s not even my guilty pleasure, it’s my out in the open pleasure that I talk about with everyone. It’s amazing to me how many grown women watch Teen Mom, but I love it!
Fun! I’ve lived in three countries – Ireland, Scotland and the USA. Mushrooms on pizza -always. I love the mountains and the desert and just Utah in general.
That is awesome that you got to live in other countries! Utah is gorgeous and I can definitely see why you live there 🙂
Hi from the blog hop!
Sorry to hear you are injured 😦
I am considering reading Harry Potter to my kiddies at night…do you think they would lie it (they are 7 and 5)
3 places I lived as a child:
-Greeec
-Brooklyn NY
-Jamaica
You lived in such cool places! As for Harry Potter – the first one is definitely a kid’s book, but they get really dark from there. I might read them yourself first to see if you think your 5 year old would enjoy it. Quite a few people die, but overall it’s a story about good vs evil and has a ton of amazing life lessons in it so you’d have to see if that would outweigh the sad/dark moments. I cried reading them and I was an adult!
oh ok…thanks for the heads up!
My top 3 ways to workout – weightlifting, kickboxing, and yoga. Broccoli on pizza???
You have to try it! It’s really good on white pizza with some chicken.
Wow, I learned so much about you today even though I’ve been reading your blog for awhile now. I had no idea how long you and your husband have been together for. That’s absolutely incredible!
Let’s see, three places that I’ve loved visiting (one of these shouldn’t surprise you at all):
1. Disney World
2. Hawaii
3. Catalina Island
Haha I knew Disney would be on there! Yeah, my husband and I met when we were 19 and sophomores in college. We basically grew up together!
I love pizza but this is the first I’ve heard of reindeer sausage as a topping. Actually it’s the first time I’ve heard of reindeer sausage – what’s the flavor like? I love trying new foods 🙂
My favorite pizza toppings are sausage (boring, traditional type!), artichokes and green olives. So delish!
Reindeer sausage is so good! It just tastes like really yummy sausage – like if you ate it without knowing what it was, you’d probably never notice. They sell it in the grocery stores here, but I bet it would be hard to find in the Lower 48! Sausage is such a yummy pizza topping in general so I’m glad we have that in common!
Fun post! Sorry to hear you’re dealing with injury :(. I love broccoli on my pizza too though my husband seems to thin that’s crazy. He doesn’t know what he’s missing.
So many people were shocked by that one! I’m just shocked they’ve never tried it, especially on white pizza!
haha, I’m with you on #1! I got carded last-last Thanksgiving because I was trying to buy Diablo 3, which is labeled for “mature audiences” because of the violence (…sigh).
I’ve been to Alaska once and ah, that midnight sun was the best! ❤ I'm not the biggest fan of running, but I like hiking and yoga! World's End State Park sounds rather cool! 😀
Haha that story about getting carded is hilarious! My mom keeps telling me I’m going to love looking young when I’m in my 40s 🙂
We’ll just be thankful about it in a couple decades!
Great minds think alike! Check out my spotlight tomorrow for the 1-2-3’s of me! 🙂
My husband has been dying to move to AK ever since he saw a show on HGTV about buying property there. I also LOVE extra cheese on my pizza – the cheesier the better. I’ve always said I’d rather be six feet under than lactose intolerant. (dramatic I know) but seriously!
Haha that’s awesome! I can’t wait to read it! Alaska is amazing and it’s really fun to live here so I support your husband’s dreams 🙂 We just up and moved here 2 years ago after coming up here on vacation because it’s so gorgeous!
I would totally try reindeer sausage! Fun fact about me: I have very eclectic taste in music. My Pandora stations include everything from Johnny Cash to Lorde.
It’s so yummy! And I love your fun fact. I have a pretty random taste in music too!
Hi from the hop (I’ve been reading for a long time though- princess ’14 was my first half as well!) I’ve been loving following your Alaska adventures. My husband lived in Denali for 6 months in college and I’ve been dying to make a trip up there!
Yay thanks for stopping by! You have to come up here – it’s amazing! Denali is so incredible!
You live in a place I could seriously visit every June and never get bored. Although I’d love to visit sometime in the winter when the Northern lights are going, that would just be wow.
I ran the Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage a few years back, I absolutely loved it. (If you ever get in the marathon mood, you definitely should run that one.) I was there a few weeks, so I agree you have some awesome trails there, and I bet I didn’t even scratch the surface while visiting. Seward, Denali and Talakeenta were my favorite places to visit outside of Anchorage while I was there.
Your favorite things about blogging are also my own!
Bar Harbor is also one of my favorite places to visit, it’s stunning there!
No way! I ran the Mayor’s Midnight Sun marathon relay with my coworkers last year! I was leg #2 which was the tank trail portion. It was so much fun! I actually lived in Seward for almost 6 months before moving to Anchorage so it will always have a special place in my heart. It is just so beautiful there, but it’s so quiet and remote in the winter that I don’t think I could live there full time. If you ever come up here in the winter you’d probably want to go to Fairbanks. They get way more opportunities to see the northern lights than we do in Anchorage – I feel like it’s always cloudy on days when we get solar storms far enough south to see them, and I usually have to drive 45 minutes out of the city to be able to see them without light pollution. But in Fairbanks you’re so far north that they’re out almost all the time! It’s just crazy cold there during the winter.
Hi Kristen! So great to connect with you through the blog hop! I love those pictures of you running towards the Alaska Mountain skyline in your about section – they are GORGEOUS! I would definitely be an outdoor runner if I had that scenery to look at every day! Love your 1, 2, 3’s idea for the intro post too. Reindeer sausage? Never heard of it, but I’d be willing to try it someday! Sounds pretty good! 🙂
Yes, it’s so much more fun running outdoors in Alaska than indoors! And reindeer sausage basically tastes like regular sausage, just a bit yummier 🙂 Hopefully you can come up here some day and try it!
Love the fun blog idea! Here are three things about me:
1: I would love to be an archivist or a librarian.
2: I always have a notebook and pen with me.
3: I have a minor pepsi addiction that I’m really working on.
Nice to “meet” you on the hop!
I always carry a notebook and pen too! You never know when you’ll need one! 🙂
Love this idea! 3 fun facts:
1. I’ve also been dating my husband for 10 years and married for 5.
2. We just made the life changing move from MD to FL.
3.I have never seen any of the shows you listed above!
That’s awesome you guys have been together for so long AND that you made a huge move too! Love how much we have in common!
Coming to you from the hop (sorry I am a little late…my computer crashed last week and was being a pain). Anyways, I grew up mostly in PA, but kinda in the middle between Philly and Pitt. My husband really wants to take a trip to Alaska. Any tips?
See you around!
The flu last week kicked my butt and I got behind on Blog Hop posts – I’m so sorry!!
I really want to visit Alaska one day. When I lived on Vancouver Island we had cruise ships go by in the summer, and even had a port for a while, so I’d love to do a cruise to see the sights and some of the state.