Every finish line is the sum of a thousand mornings the crowd never saw.
The Nudge
I started running in 2011 without any particular plan. No race on the calendar, no coach, no program. I just ran. Down the block and back, then a little farther. I wasn’t fast — I want to be clear about that. I wasn’t graceful. But there was something about the pavement under my feet, the quiet at six in the morning, the way my thoughts untangled with every mile, that got into my blood and stayed there.
Running does that. It gets in.
The sport has belonged to ordinary people for longer than most realize. The Boston Marathon has been run since 1897 — not originally for elites, but for the community, for the butcher and the bricklayer, for the person with something to prove and nowhere else to prove it. The run club movement carried that spirit forward, turning Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings into something almost sacred for millions of people around the world who simply needed to move and a tribe to move with.
I wanted to share that with Giovanna. With Gio.
For a while, she watched from the sideline — politely, warmly, and with absolutely no intention of joining me. I pushed gently. She pushed back, with considerably more conviction. This is, I should mention, a pattern in our marriage that extends well beyond running.
Then one Wednesday evening changed everything.
Her First Mile — In Her Words
“My husband was the one who pushed me to join a run club. I didn’t know what to expect. I ran one mile and felt something I had never felt before — it was pure connection. A simple beginning, but a definitive one.”— Giovanna Valdivia
I remember watching her come back from that first mile. She was breathless in a way that had nothing to do with being out of shape. There was a look on her face I hadn’t seen before — something between surprise and recognition, like she’d stumbled upon a room inside herself she didn’t know existed.
She didn’t say much. She didn’t have to. I’d seen that look before. I’d worn it myself, three years earlier, on a quiet street in the early morning.
She was hooked.
2014: Starting at Zero
Gio was 39 years old when she began running seriously. Not jogging. Not dabbling. Running — with intention, with curiosity, and with the particular stubbornness of someone who has decided that something matters.
She was learning how to breathe. How to find a rhythm that her body hadn’t been asked to find before. Three miles felt impossible. Not hard — impossible. And she ran them anyway.
This is one of running’s best-kept secrets: the sport is extraordinarily forgiving of late starters. Endurance is built slowly, over years, and it rewards patience and consistency far more reliably than it rewards youth. The marathon world is full of people who crossed their first finish line at 40, at 50, at 60. The road does not ask when you arrived. It only asks that you keep moving.
Gio kept moving.
Weston Run Club: A Community That Lifts
In 2015, she joined the Weston Run Club. And something shifted.
There are things a run club gives you that solo running simply cannot. Accountability — the kind that gets you out of bed when your own willpower won’t. Pace groups that push you without breaking you. Laughter in the dark miles. Shared suffering, which is, paradoxically, one of the most bonding human experiences available to us. And the invisible thread that connects strangers who have nothing in common except that they showed up, on the same corner, in the same humidity, for the same inexplicable reason.
By that same year — 2015 — Gio had become a pacer herself.
Let that land for a moment. She had barely learned how to breathe through three miles, and she was already pulling other people forward. That is what determination does. It turns receivers into givers. It turns the student into the guide before the student even realizes the transformation has happened.
The Weston Run Club gathers every Wednesday at 7 PM at the Clock Tower at Weston Town Center, part of Baptist Health’s free wellness program — with two pace groups (under and over 9 min/mile) and an open door for anyone who wants to show up. No pressure. No ego. Just people who run.
The 7 World Marathon Majors
The World Marathon Majors series launched in 2006 with five founding races: Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. Tokyo joined in 2013, making it six and giving rise to the Six Star Medal — one of the most coveted achievements in recreational running, a multi-year odyssey that the majority of runners spend the better part of a decade pursuing. In 2025, Sydney was added as the seventh Major, the first Southern Hemisphere race to join the circuit, and the series became what it is today: seven cities, seven stages, one of the most demanding journeys in endurance sport.
Gio completed all seven.
She ran Boston — the oldest, the one that started it all in 1897, the one that carries the weight of the sport’s entire history in its hills. She ran New York, crossing five boroughs through a roar of crowd noise that can make you cry at mile 23 even when everything hurts. She ran Berlin, where the course is flat and fast and the world records fall like leaves in October. She ran Chicago through the electric corridors of the Loop. She crossed London’s iconic red start line and ran toward one of the greatest finishes in sport. She ran Tokyo under cherry blossoms, in the quiet discipline of a city that knows how to honor effort. And she ran Sydney, with the harbor stretched out beyond the horizon, at the edge of the world.
To complete all seven Majors is not a weekend project. It is training cycles measured in months, not weeks. It is mornings in the dark when no one is watching. It is nutrition managed like a craft, sleep protected like a resource, and injuries navigated with patience that borders on faith. It is mile 20 of the marathon — the place where the race actually begins — where the body has spent everything it knows how to spend, and something else has to take over. Something quieter and harder than fitness.
She found that something. Across seven cities, on seven start lines, through years of structured work that most people will never fully see — she found it.
And more than the medals, more than the finish lines: she uncovered a capacity for excellence that had been there, waiting, for nearly four decades. She just hadn’t gone looking for it yet.
Moving at Different Paces, Same Direction
We still run today.
Not at the same pace. Not with the same cadence. We don’t always run side by side — her stride has become something I watch with more admiration than I can easily put into words, and mine has become the steady, unremarkable thing it always was. We are in our own spaces now, our own breath, our own quiet conversations with the road.
But we run. That is what fifteen years of a running marriage looks like. Not matching splits. Not coordinated training plans. Matching commitment. The same intention, even when the steps don’t align.
There is something I find deeply true in that — something that has nothing to do with running and everything to do with it. We keep moving forward together, even when we’re moving separately. That has always been enough. More than enough.
USATF Certified: The Coach
Gio is now a USATF Certified Running Coach.
USA Track & Field is the national governing body for track, field, and long-distance running in the United States. Its coaching certification is among the most respected credentials in the sport, requiring structured coursework, comprehensive testing, and a deep working knowledge of training theory, biomechanics, periodization, and athlete development. It is not a title handed out. It is earned.
She has earned every syllable of it.
She didn’t arrive here on natural talent. She arrived through twelve years of discipline, through hundreds of training runs in the Florida heat, through seven world-stage marathons and all the invisible work that surrounds them. She arrived through the Wednesday nights she showed up when she didn’t feel like it, through the miles she ran when the miles didn’t cooperate, through the version of herself she became because she refused to stop becoming.
Every lesson she teaches, she has lived. That is not a given. That is rare.
If you are a runner at any level — beginner, returning, or chasing your next PR — and you are looking for coaching, structure, and accountability rooted in real experience, reach out to Gio at coach.unalunashop.com.
Follow her journey on Instagram: @unalunashop
And if you are in or near Weston, FL — come run with her. Every Wednesday at 7 PM, at the Clock Tower in Weston Town Center. Free. Welcoming. No pressure. Just the road and the people on it.
I have watched her for twelve years. I watched her come back breathless from a single mile and turn that mile into seven continents. I watched her go from learning how to breathe to teaching others how to fly.
She didn’t know she was a runner.
Until she was.