​The first thing you notice about Kamie Peterson is her smile.

Next it’s her eyes – big and wide open and always looking right into yours.

And then it’s her ready laugh and ability to make you feel like you’ve been friends forever, even if you just met. She’s sisterly and kind and curious about everyone she meets.

But put her in a wetsuit, on a bike or running, and she changes to her game face.

The 43-year-old mom of three has been all over the regional triathlon scene this summer, racing and placing and figuring out that her new love is multisport.

Peterson has been a long-distance runner for several years – she ran in high school and then took a hiatus to start and raise a family. When she was 35, her daughter suggested a run after Easter brunch, and Peterson went along.

“We ran 2 miles, and I thought, oh, that was fun,” Peterson laughs. She kept it up, adding miles every week until she was basically in constant shape to run half-marathons and other races.
 After a few years, she was ready for a new challenge: Triathlon.

“I knew it was something that was going to be hard to do. And to do all three of those events back to back as fast as you possibly can is such a huge challenge, and that’s what I wanted,” she says.
Peterson has always loved swimming.

“It comes easy for me,” she says. She especially loves open water swimming, which can be a barrier for people new to the sport.

“I try not to think about what’s in the water, just fish swimming by me, and as long as I can’t see what’s in the water, I’m fine,” she laughs.

So that part wasn’t tough.

As for biking, like many of us, she’s been riding a bike since she was a kid, but nothing serious. She bought a road bike. Like most triathletes, she quickly realized she wanted a faster bike. So she bought a second one. That lasted a season, and now she’s moved on to a triathlon-specific bike.
“If you don’t have the right bike, it can really affect your time,” Peterson says. Still, she says starting with what she had was just fine, and the triathlon community welcomed her with open arms.

She was intimidated the first time she lined up for a triathlon – just not knowing what to expect. But when she got done, she couldn’t wait to line up again.

“And that’s the way I’ve felt now after every one.”

She has a few more races left this year and hopes to do a half-Ironman one day. Her training is still a long run of about 10 miles every week – to stay half-marathon ready – and then swimming a few times a week and biking once a week.

“I’m not really hardcore,” Peterson says. “I’m just trying to keep moving in the right direction.”

In large part, she credits the other participants with helping pull her along in that direction – which has ended on the podium for several races.
​
“The people I’ve met in the running world and triathlon world are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” Peterson says. “I have friends that I’ll have forever from both worlds. That makes it so much more fun – having good friends surrounding you and doing the things you love.”

​Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear every other Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at jpalfyklemond@gmail.com. Story ideas are encouraged.

​I went home recently, for the first time in seven years.
 
To Cleveland, to see my dad, who has dementia. I wanted to sit and talk to him while he still could, to hear him tell stories while he still could, to tell him how much I love him while he can still understand it. To hug his wife and thank her for taking care of him.
 
To do all the things you think you should do because you’ve heard from too many people about their regrets – parents who died suddenly or family members who were estranged or people who were just too stubborn.

​I didn’t say all the things I wanted to say – I couldn’t for a lot of reasons. Sometimes because I didn’t think I could even get the words out without crying too hard for anyone to understand me. Sometimes because I was angry at life and what decades of hard living does to someone and couldn’t be gracious inside.
 
You don’t go home to fight, and I didn’t.
 
I just went to bear witness to his life, and mine, and ours.
 
The road in front of the house I was born to is heaving concrete, weeds and low three-bedroom houses from the late 1950s. It’s in the flight path of the airport, past auto plants running at half their old capacity, if that, and shuttered businesses.
 
My old neighbor sat on her front steps, petting a huge orange cat, waiting for me to pull up. It would have been so easy to cancel, to say, no, it’s all just too much to cram into a short visit, and when I saw her sitting there, I was so grateful I hadn’t. We talked. We looked at a scrapbook about her son, who died when he was 29. We talked about her kids and her husband and my parents and my sisters. She’s lived there since 1961. She knocked on the door of another neighbor who has been there that long and she came out on the step.
 
I can’t explain how weird it was to be surrounded by people who know me, who know things about me and remember things about my life that I don’t. I’ve been in Sioux Falls for nearly 18 years now, longer than anywhere else, but it still fascinates me when I try to think about how layered this town would be for me if I grew up here. You would see, all the time, people from every part of your life.
 
I never see that. I just see them from this part. This post-college, professional life part.
 
Not the parts that made me, or saved me, or scared me.
 
We stayed for about two hours, drove into the next neighborhood to buy authentic pierogis and stuffed cabbage, kolaches and cookies. I stuck the pierogis to the pans when I cooked them for my dad, but he didn’t complain. The next day my aunt and cousin came, and I texted them, “You have to cook these, I butchered the first batch.”
 
They laughed and used three times as much butter as I did, and the sauerkraut and potato pierogis were golden and crispy and the best thing I’ve eaten in a long, long time.
 
I drove through Ohio down to Athens, in the southeastern part of the state, where I went to Ohio University and graduated in 1998, after spending five years there earning a degree in English.
 
We ate kolaches and listened to polka music on Ohio public radio on the drive.
 
“Why are all the lyrics in polka music about polka,” Patrick asked.
 
It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. Why not?
 
It turned to classic rock to bluegrass as we made our way down the state, into the rolling green hills of southeastern Ohio.
 
I won’t bore you with details of everywhere we went down my own college memory lane, but I wanted to write about the Hocking Hills. It’s just a state park area down there, in an area full of state parks and national forests. It’s all rocky outcroppings and exposed roots, water trickling through the bottom and falling over ledges.
 
It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, tucked away in these winding roads.
 
It’s local bluegrass covers of Bob Dylan songs, and camping and hiking and getting stung by a bee once in the hand while at the bottom of the trail. It’s dusk sitting on the ledge. It’s eating takeout Chinese food in the car on the way there, or hauling a tent out to a walk-in site one summer evening.
 
It was a place I went to at a time when everything was opening up to me – a world of being outdoors and eating local food and learning how to cook and reading, so much reading. When for the first time I felt at home.
 
I was on the plane coming home, and I felt so clichéd, so ridiculous with all these feelings about having been back, and then I realized there’s a reason coming of age novels are so popular – it’s a classic story, one we’ve all been through. And I think it happens more than once in your life, that moment or place where everything stops and something new starts.
 
For me, the first time was there, in Athens, Ohio, in the Hocking Hills just outside, on those winding roads with public radio playing.
There’s a line in an Avett Brothers song, “The road is gone / I can’t go back the way we came.” It’s about the end of a marriage, and I was about to write that it’s not coming of age, but that’s its own awakening, I think, that sort of major life overhaul.
 
As I hiked through the state park, I thought about all the things I learned to do in southeastern Ohio – mountain biking, cooking, camping. And I thought about how those have all translated through my life.
 
This time when I was there, I had on a pair of trail shoes and had packed clothes to run there. It didn’t work out that way – instead I connected with an old friend and she brought her daughter and we made slow and beautiful progress through the trees.
 
But if it hadn’t been for those woods, and for countless woods after, from Newton Hills to Zumbro to miles of meditation at Good Earth, I wouldn’t be where I am. And I’m glad I could go back and let the tears run down my face in the Hocking Hills and know that this is part of what made me.
 
And I like that place, this place, this spot in my life. Every day I try to remind myself to be grateful, to remember to be happy, to appreciate. To marvel at the kids growing up before my eyes. To hold Patrick’s hand and share that moment of intimacy in a crowd. To laugh hard, really hard, at a story my cousin told while we sat around the patio table at my dad’s house, to watch him watch us, seeing his family full of joy, while he can still recognize it.
 
To recognize it myself. 

​​Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear every other Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at jpalfyklemond@gmail.com. Story ideas are encouraged.

​I came across I column I wrote the other day.
 
It was from years ago, and it was about literature and how I can think about certain books and suddenly be back wherever I was the first time I read them. I think of “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton and picture myself sitting on a folding stepstool outside of the apartments my family lived in in Elyria, Ohio. I was in third grade.
 
Sometimes in that same memory, I’m selling lemonade to union guys coming to a United Auto Workers meeting my dad was holding at the event hall at the apartment complex. Maybe I read while I waited for customers. Maybe it was two separate events. Maybe the stepstool is the only constant.
 
It was black and yellow and the kind that has two steps, with rubber pads on each one. I used to turn it around and sit on the lower step and use the upper one as a desk. It’s the kind of stepstool I wish I had about once a week, especially when a smoke alarm battery starts chirping.
 
I don’t know what’s true. It’s all variations on a theme, just like everything.
 
But it made me think of words. And poetry. And music. 

​Every time I hear the phrase “variations on a theme,” I think of the poem by Ken Koch, and who knows where I first read it. It’s variations on the poem “This is just to say,” by William Carlos Williams:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
In Koch’s version, something goes awry, every time. Here’s my favorite:
 
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
 
I don’t know why I like it. For the same reason, I love all the Edward Gorey books, literary and twisted, just how I like it. Kind of funny and horrifying. Like all the best things, right?
 
I dig a little darkness in my art.
 
But mostly what I love is watching someone interpret someone else’s work. We all come at things from a different perspective, with all the ways we’ve been wronged or all the things we’ve hoped or all the ways we’ve loved and unloved, done and undone.
 
It happens in everything. I see it all the time – someone online will ask, “What’s your favorite race,” and 10 people post as many different replies. That’s OK. They all come at it in different ways. I love the Twin Cities Marathon because I was successful at qualifying for Boston there. I hate the Vermont City Marathon because I wasn’t. Same with Phoenix. It isn’t the fault of the race or the organizer, but sometimes you need something besides yourself to blame.
 
The variation can be in your training, in your perspective, in your reasoning for going at all. It doesn’t matter – it’s whatever you say it is.
 
A few weeks ago, I started teaching cycling classes at the gym again. I haven’t done it in about a year and I was a little anxious about starting up – how does their stereo system work, will I have any issues at 5 a.m., and will I be able to solve them. We went over the day before so I could try everything out, make sure I could make the microphone work, the music play. And in a moment of panic, I worried that my ancient iPod wouldn’t work.
 
I may be the only person left who hasn’t been streaming music on their phone. Instead, it’s just whatever songs are on my iPod, with whatever I’ve bought in the last year, having lost all of my iTunes music in the process of life.
 
So I signed up for Spotify, paid for the version without ads, and downloaded a playlist of some of my favorite spin class songs I’ve used in the past and a variety of other stuff. Maybe I can make this work without a bunch of bad pop (nothing against bad pop, I love it, too).
 
This was all glorious to Viv, 7, who realized she could now use my old iPod to play music. That’s meant she’d discovered a lot of songs that have what she calls – rightly so – inappropriate lyrics. It also means she’s blasting Jason Isbell or The Lumineers from the front yard, which makes me as proud as when I find her holed up with a book somewhere.
 
The soundtrack of my life is some of what I love, some of what the people I love adore and some of what I just grew up listening to on the radio. Just like those books can put me there, so can the songs, pulling off the road more often than I admit, to cry in my car for reasons I can’t explain. You just have to sit there and sing it and feel it.
 
The class went fine. An Avett Brothers song I’m obsessed with, “January Wedding,” came up during a spin and it was a poor choice, but I let it play out because it makes me happy. Nobody seemed to mind.
 
A friend of mine was telling me about a night she drove across northern Minnesota listening to the Avett Brothers the whole time, and another friend remembers nursing her newborn to a live recording of them. For each of these women, this is the background to those events, to that dark, dark drive, to that time in the middle of the night with a mewling baby and a sense of wonder mixed with terror. These are their variations on this Avett Brothers theme.
 
For me, I don’t know.
 
I think about a run at Good Earth State Park last year, just me and Neil Young.
 
I recently pulled up “Athens County” by Jonathon Edwards, a terrible song, as I plan a trip home to Ohio later this summer to see my dad, whose mind is crumbling around him, who played Paul Simon’s “Graceland” for me nonstop for years, who made me listen to Marty Robbins as we drove through the night to Rhode Island. Who loves Jimmy Buffett and took me to see him at outdoor venues throughout Ohio. Is it the best music I’ve ever heard? No, not even close. But I was some of the best times of my life.
 
My cheeseburger in paradise was wine coolers at Blossom Music Center in Ohio.
 
The runs I’ve done in these cities lay alongside these soundtracks, layered on the books I read and the NPR shows I listened to, the local food I ate and the people I knew.
 
It’s all variations on a theme, the theme of just living. The theme of not knowing what you’ve done, of knowing all along, of knowing it was wrong or right, of knowing there’s only one way, and that’s through.
 
This past weekend, I was riding my bike to Luverne, Minn., and there was some gravel, and I’m still a little sketchy on it, still worried about falling, still sometimes taking medicine to make my wrist stop hurting. And as I rolled through the countryside, I sang to myself over and over, “The hardest part is through,” a line from a Lumineers song, a sentiment echoed in everything from embroidery to 12-step programs.
 
And yet it’s true.
 
I started this post thinking I would talk about some of my favorite cover songs, and about why I love them – to hear how someone else imagines something – stemmed partly from the Spotify stations that play acoustic covers and partly from thinking again about this drive in Ohio and Woody Guthrie songs interpreted by Billy Bragg and Wilco. I will always be in my car between Columbus and Cleveland, listening to “California Stars,” laying on the gravel road at The Ridges, the bike path that runs along the Hocking River.
 
Always.
 
I’ll be there with Lucinda Williams. I’ll be in Athens with Van Morrison and NPR. I’ll be in Good Earth with Neil Young. In the Phoenix marathon with Quintron and Miss Pussycat or Dennis Ferrer, step by metronome step toward just missing qualifying for Boston.
 
Right now, I’m reading “Less” by Andrew Sean Greer, and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. I mark nearly every page with words I want to live in. I’m about three-fourths through the book, and some of it I can’t stop thinking about. Think about this: A line where the narrator describes someone as the kind of person who doesn’t need to be reminded to put his oxygen mask on first. That tells you everything you need to know about that person.
 
But then there’s this, talking about grief, the “salt in the pudding,” as he writes.
 
“Didn't Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: "I really wish you weren't crying right now"). Don't little children, awakened one morning and told, "Now you're five!" - don't they wail at the universe's descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death - shouldn't we all wail to the stars?” 
 
So when the Avett Brothers say, “are you aware the shape I’m in, my hands they shake, my head it spins.”
 
We know.
 
We’ll take you in.
 
Like a pair of stolen, polished dimes. Ask to dance. It’s fine.
 
Wail to the stars. Steal the plums from the icebox. Fins to the left.
 
Walk the tightrope in the snow, walk it again between the towers. 

​Jacqueline Palfy is a longtime runner, reader and writer, marathoner, mom and board member of the nonprofit Sioux Falls Area Running Club. Her contributions to the 605 Running Co. blog will appear every other Tuesday. You can follow her on Twitter @runnerJPK or reach her at jpalfyklemond@gmail.com. Story ideas are encouraged.

Do you remember what you were doing four years ago?

Our store will be celebrating its fourth birthday this month!

Four years ago I was working full time for my parents at The Cookie Jar Eatery. My life was full of new things. I had recently graduated from college, gotten married and bought a house. You’d have a much better chance of finding me on a golf course in those days than out training for marathons. In fact I was barely a runner four years ago. My resume consisted of one half marathon and two 5k’s. So how did I end up as a part owner of the 605 Running Company?

Three brothers, two cities and the love of running. The Watley Brothers have a long history in both Sioux Falls and Lincoln, Nebraska. Four years ago Grant and Paul were both at the University of Sioux Falls while Logan had become a very active member with the Lincoln Running Company in Nebraska. With their combined experiences the brothers hatched a plan to create a running community center in Sioux Falls. A speciality outfitter helping runners of all abilities find success through the sport they had loved throughout their lives.

Back then things looked a little different in Downtown Sioux Falls too. We had a number vacancies up and down Phillips Avenue. I remember being very vocal in membership meetings for DTSF about the need for us to actively recruit more business to the block. Out of those meetings came the Downtown Incubator Program. The 605 Running Company was the first business to utilize this program.

I applied to work at the store part time on the nights and weekends. When I interviewed, Paul and the General Manager Wayne had a conversation about how they had already hired enough employees and that the plan was to meet me, but not hire me. After we walked through the unfinished store, chatted about the downtown business community and shared war stories about USF I was hired. Part time, nights and weekends. My personal goal was to save the money I made at the store for a new truck that I’d had my sights on (fun fact, I still don’t own that truck).

After a month in business Paul was presented with a job opportunity in is actual profession in Texas that he couldn’t pass up. With his departure came a job opening. Leaving the family business was a very difficult decision for me. I had worked in that bakery since high school and my parents had supported every turn my career had taken through college and as a budding young professional. Helping to build a new business from the ground up was the equivalent of graduate school for me. The Watley’s gave me unprecedented decision making abilities and tasked me with growing the business with a community first approach. A lot of the things we’ve done are very non-traditional, but our business is people and our profits are measured by our communities success and growth through running.

In four years as our business has grown and we’ve added more employees we’ve also been able to add private coaching services. Our store has sponsored and managed local races including our spring half marathon that was a major success. We have also worked with local running clubs Sioux Falls Women Run (which didn’t exist when we opened), Sioux Falls Area Running Club and the Prairie Striders Running Club to grow the sport. Finally, we’ve become better at what we do at the shop. Our hands on experience has made us better shoe fitters, our running resumes continue to grow which helps us add products that runners actually need and use. We are truly your local running specialty outfitters. My hope is that you view our shop as a place to go to be prepared to run, not just a place to go buy a thing.

Four years have gone by very fast. Like a graduating senior from high school our best days are certainly in front of us and not behind us. Believe me when I tell you we are just getting started and we have a ton of fun and exciting things planned for the future of 605 Running Company. I’m so humbled to be a part of this running community and cannot thank you all enough for your support of our business over the years.

​

​Greg Koch is the General Manager/Co-Owner of the 605 Running Company. When he is not at the store he volunteers on the Sioux Falls Marathon Board and Co-Coaches his church softball co-ed team. Greg is an avid runner and enjoys being outdoors whenever possible. Follow Greg on Instagram @gregrun605