In recent years, most marathons – including the Saskatchewan Marathon – have moved to offering technical shirts in lieu of cotton. The cotton t-shirts usually ended up as a quilt (if you had enough of them) or a painting, rake-the-lawn, or change-the-oil t-shirt.

Technical shirts are useful because we can actually run in them. I especially love the Sask Marathon shirt – not only for its wonderful logo, color, and style – but also because to me it is an identification of who I am and where I come from.

When we go on holidays, we take our technical Sask Marathon shirts with us to identify ourselves as Canadians or, more specifically, Saskatchewanians. You  could be jogging in Calgary and there is certainly going to be somebody  who recognizes the shirt and says, “Hey, I used to live there.” Or you could even be running in China or India and there’s a chance somebody may recognize Saskatchewan and say, “Isn’t that the home of the Synchrotron?”

Not so long ago, I was waiting in line to pick up my race package in Las Vegas at 3:45 a.m. (that is a whole other blog), when my Sask Marathon shirt sparked a conversation with the man behind me. He was from Missouri and, to him, Saskatchewan is just a place to go fishing with this friends. I took the opportunity to explain that there is a whole lot more than just hunting and fishing in Saskatchewan!

This man was particularly surprised to learn that we actually have our own marathon here. After I had quizzed him on a few Canadian facts (such as “Do you know who the Prime Minister of Canada is?”  which he, of course, didn’t),  I encouraged him to enter our race so that he too could sport a lovely shirt like myself. I’ll have to keep an eye out for him in May to see if accepted the invite!

Now, getting to the topic of today’s post: “Who’s That Girl?”:

I was running in Maui a month ago, and while I was running up a long, slow, painful incline (dying a slow death), I looked up to see what I thought must be a mirage. I immediately perked right up. Coming towards me I could see the faint outline of the Sask Marathon logo across the front of someone’s t-shirt.

The girl running towards me had no idea that I shared a connection with her and, as we passed, I smiled and waved at her, but she had a headset on so that was the extent of our exchange. That “sighting” has left me wondering: who was that girl?

I am putting a request out to everybody who reads this blog to help me identify the girl from Wailea. Certainly in the small world we live in, somebody must know who she is. Even if she doesn’t live in Saskatchewan, she has to have a connection.