All Roads Lead to Rogue: a Love Story

by Cate Westenhover

Just under a year ago, in the throes of procrastination at the end of my last semester of grad school, I set up a profile on the online dating site OK Cupid. I got extremely lucky and the first guy I met ended up becoming my fiancé. In three weeks, Jake and I are getting married. I think it’s an incredibly romantic story even if my brother describes us meeting online and starting a serious relationship two weeks later as me “ordering a boyfriend off Amazon.”  Believe me, John; if I were capable of that, I’d have done it much sooner.

As much as OK Cupid played a role in Jake and me finding each other, we have Rogue, and our whole great pursuit of running, to thank as well. Sit yourselves down, and get ready to hear our cheesy but true story.

I’ve run almost my whole life – since I was 8 years old, running next to my mom because she said it was the PE Credit for my home schooling. I’d always hoped to fall in love with a guy who ran – how could anyone understand me if he didn’t get why I ran? But somehow it hadn’t happened, all through college, and after graduation I settled with the idea that I might have to date outside the running circles.

I joined OK Cupid to meet some diverse people, but when I saw on Jake’s profile that his ideal girl would “be able to run 5-10 miles at 7:30 pace,” I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to branch out too much. As dorky as that criteria is for a potential girlfriend, I didn’t mind it when it was applied to me.

In Jake’s first message to me on OK Cupid he casually dropped that he had run in college, but he now trained with a marathon group at Rogue. When we became friends on Facebook, I saw we had 12 mutual friends already. This was before I had started working at Rogue downtown or joined Rogue AC, but I had worked at Rogue the summer before so I knew a few great Rogues. All of this really mitigated the potentially creepy factor of our online meeting and first real-life meeting.

As the months passed, Jake and I kept realizing all the connections we’ve had through running even before we met. Of course there’s the shared understanding of what it is to be a runner and live the running lifestyle, but in addition to that we’ve been on adjacent roads for a while now. It was only a matter of time…

We both ran for our college teams (Jake at TCU, me at Baylor), and since we were in the same conference we had been at several of the same cross country and track races over the last few years. I had no idea who he was, but Jake claims to have recognized me at races as “that fast girl from Baylor.” What’s weirder is that we were at one of the same races before Jake had even moved to Texas. In 2008, both of our teams were at the Paul Short Invite a thousand miles from here in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

It blows my mind that we were in the same place at the same time, again and again. There was Lehigh, the Baylor Twilight Invite, the TCU Invite, Big 12s, Regionals, the Austin Turkey Trot last fall, and then the Rogue connection last summer. There was the 7 at 7 social run which we both attended but on varying weeks, there was my boss who was one of Jake’s running buddies, there was the pub run downtown last summer that I went to but Jake skipped out on…We’re almost kind of mad that no one in Rogue tried to match-make us earlier.

The couple that takes selfies on a run together stays together.

However, left to our own devices, our paths did cross eventually, and here we are today. Through training and working at Rogue, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with Jake in our day-to-day busy lives. Last winter I got to see Jake finish his Saturday long runs back at the store when I was working. I got to train next to him this summer, hopping in his marathon group for base training. Now we get to see each other coming and going from practice. I get to see him sweating during the core class that goes on during my Monday night shift. My coworkers have started to joke that he’s at Rogue so often that he should start working there too.

The point is, we owe Rogue a lot of thanks for fostering our relationship and helping it grow. Our story is full of Rogue. And what’s cooler is that this fall, things are going full circle. In December, Jake and I plan to travel with our respective teams to compete in the USATF National Club Cross Country Championships. This year the race is on my birthday (holla! Turning 25), and it’s at Lehigh University, on the same course where Jake and I both stood together, unknowingly, over six years ago.

I’m glad the paths have finally synced up.

Home

by Cate Westenhover

158 people move to Austin every day, and the Austin natives are getting scarcer. I’m one of them – I was lucky enough to grow up here, and five years away at college was all I needed to absolutely confirm that I belong here.

I was the black sheep of the family for leaving at all, although I barely did. It was assumed I would follow my parents and older siblings in attending UT Austin.

Sic ‘Em

Steve Sisson, our coach at Rogue now, was the coach at UT during my senior year of high school. Steve hosted me for a visit; I met the team, and sat in his office underneath his Pre poster while we talked training. He had dinner at my house with my parents. My dream of being a longhorn seemed close.

But rebel child that I was, I ended up accepting a last-minute scholarship to run track at Baylor, 90 miles up the road. Between academic and athletic aid, Baylor was cheaper, and I followed the money. Turning down the opportunity to compete for UT was difficult, and telling Steve on the phone that I’d accepted another offer was even harder.

Baylor treated me well, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was the place for me.

No mercy for Jacob’s alma mater 

But I could never quite get Austin out of my head. There were the summers spent at home, running countless laps of Town Lake, when UT seemed so close.  Also, since Baylor and UT were both in the Big 12, we raced each other a lot. Steve always cheered for me, even when we hadn’t talked for months. He never held it against me that I went to Baylor.

After five and a half years and two degrees at Baylor, I was done with school but not with running. I knew I wanted to be part of a post-collegiate group, but I’d missed my last year of competing at Baylor thanks to an injury, and my prospects of joining a team seemed bleak. Like any wanderlust-filled college grad I’d schemed about moving to Colorado or Arizona to make my living in the mountains. I’d never considered joining Rogue AC even though it was right under my nose; joining the hometown team and staying in Austin seemed too easy.

I moved back home after graduation in December, unsure of the future and a little demoralized. While I scoped out the vague future, I took a job at Rogue Running, the retail side of Rogue. I’d worked there the summer before, and I was impressed with their authenticity and dedication to Austin’s running community through the hundreds of runners they coach each year. It was easy to see that this was where I wanted to work, being around people who shared my passion. After a couple weeks, it became clear that this was where I should run, too.

Steve was kind enough to bring me on the Rogue AC team as out of shape as I was, and I started workouts with the team in February.  I think what made me feel really welcome at Rogue though was when Steve told me “I’m only sorry I didn’t get to coach you during college too.”

I found a home, and it was here all along. Rogue IS Austin, and I’m so proud to be part of an organization that supports Austin’s runners so deeply. It’s an honor to rep Rogue on the retail floor and now on the race course.