How did your relationship blossom?
Kim: I lived two hours away so we emailed a lot. I think I looked for excuses to go to Orlando. Besides the relay race, our first race together was the Orlando half marathon. Then we did a Disney race and so on. I was always looking for a reason to go there. We definitely had a connection. And I think we used running to solidify that. I guess, March 2010 we officially got together.
When did you get engaged?
Tyler: Um, December 2011.Kim: Well, we had already decided that we were going to get married at the Keys after Ragnar FLK. There are two storylines.
Please share; looking at these dates seems like this was a quick engagement.
Kim: (Laughing) we became very close as friends. Became official in March, so in April 2010 I moved to Orlando, mainly because of Tyler and I had started school. But we had done the Ragnar Relay FLK before. We just finished another ultra-relay this past spring; we were driving and I said, "wouldn't it be cool to get married at the end of the Ragnar Keys?" We started thinking of different themes and all that stuff.Tyler: Yea, we were just having fun with it...coming up with different slogans for the van, what costumes we could wear...it was just fun.
Kim: And that's when we came up with our name, Racing to the Altar (laughing).
I told him I don't want a ring or anything. So in September 2011 we announced to our family and friends that we were going to get married at the end of the Ragnar Relay. We sent out the save-the-date in September. The proposal didn't come until December when Tyler asked me with a ring, even though I said he didn't need to get me a ring (laughing).
Tyler: It's not the traditional order, but you know there was a registration deadline with Ragnar and we needed to make sure we had our team together.
You ran with your bridal party correct? How did you select who would run with you?
Tyler: You know, this was really interesting. One of the things we had to figure out was who do we know that we wanted to be a part of our special day and would be up for tackling a relay as an ultra-team.Kim: That was definitely one thing we talked about, that we wanted to do it as an ultra. The idea of a 12-person team just seemed like a lot. So we started to narrow the field down, "who can be in our bridal party?"
Tyler: I think one of the biggest debates we had was, and I don't want to say who is cut out to run with us, but who do we know that would really be up for it (laughing). And I think we ended up with a great group.
My twin brother, Matt, was my best man and introduced me to endurance events. So he was an easy decision because we knew he would say yes.
