Meeting Up

If online services could help me find my fiancee, I figured I may as well turn to the computer again to build my social network. Things in Boulder had been a little lonely with Ed working diligently in California, so I decided to check out a site I'd heard about before called MeetUp.com. The idea is that you join online groups based on your interests, then attend events to meet people you might like. I joined several groups, including a running group, two book clubs (one of them is a book-and-hiking club, in which members discuss books on the trail!), and a group of women with nothing in common other than the fact that we're all female and all enjoy doing fun stuff. I was/am particularly excited about the running group, but was worried that the other members would all be hardcore runners; since I'm still sort of struggling to find my stride, I opted to wait a bit on that one. But then I saw a meet-up scheduled for the group of women at the Boulder Running Company for their weekly run.

The Boulder Running Company is THE running store here. When I need any kind of gear (on my list: trail running shoes and reflective clothing so I can run at night), this is where I'll go. The staff is friendly and unbelievably knowledgable. They also host tons of events, like last night's run. At 6:00, people meet in front of the store, enter a raffle, then head out for a three- or five-mile loop together. Afterward, there's free beer and pizza at the store, and they draw names to figure out who wins raffle prizes.

I was still a little nervous to run with a group, but the organizer of the women's group posted that she is not a runner and hates running but is willing to try anything with a fun group, and lots of other people posted that they, too, weren't really runners, were slow, or were out of shape. Perfect. I was also a little worried about the kind of people who would show up. What if there was a good reason they had to go online to meet others? But it seemed that most of the people in the group had moved here fairly recently, and I figured that if I didn't like them I had nothing to lose but an uncomfortable hour or so, after which I could make my excuses and leave.

I needn't have worried at all about my fitness level. I think I AM still adjusting (and several of the girls I met said that it took them months, which makes me feel a lot better), but these girls weren't lying about their pacing abilities, and we did the 3.7-mile loop at a slower pace than I've run since middle school. I needn't have worried about the attendees, either. I had a great time and really liked everyone that I met. I talked to six girls at length and all of them were really nice and fun. Most have been in Boulder only a short time. I was the newest transplant, but one girl had been here only a month and others ranged from a few months to a year or two. Some of the girls were distance runners just struggling with the altitude--one girl told me she just signed up for a marathon to get her motivated to run in the thinner air--so it's possible that I'll be able to set up some running dates down the road.

We were among the last to make it back to the store, and the atmosphere in the parking lot was party-like with music, beer, pizza, and candy. There was a Halloween costume contest (none of us dressed up, as we didn't know this was happening) and, of course, the raffle, in which one of the girls in our group won a pair of Smartwool socks. We all hung around in the parking lot chatting until someone said she was freezing and we realized that we all were and dispersed.

I've signed up for another meet-up with this group in mid-November; we'll be doing a dessert cooking class at Sur La Table. And I'm planning a run today. If it goes at all well, I plan to drag myself out of bed in time to meet up with the women's running club for a morning run and cup of coffee tomorrow!