I cannot WAIT for this one. The excitement has been building now for several months. On April 24th, my wife and will travel to Nashville, Tennessee to participate in the Music City Half Marathon. While visiting Nashville for the first time will be exciting by itself, there are so many great stories heading into this race. These are just a few:

1. It is going to be my absolute honor and privilege to finally meet up with a guy that has become a very close friend through the web. We connected originally through our friends at Thomas Nelson Publishing and have built a brotherhood that is just awesome. David Schroeder and his wife have opened their home to us for the weekend and he is going to be our running partner for 13.1 miles. It’s going to be great.

2. My good friend Jeff is also headed to Nashville for the weekend to run the race. He was one of the fortunate people that signed up to run it with TobyMac (see video for more). While helping a good cause, Jeff will also get the opportunity to meet one his favorite artist and share the journey with him. I’m thrilled for Jeff and can’t wait to hear how his weekend went.

3. Our friends Rachel and Matt Wojnarowski (whose blog you should really follow) are also headed to Nashville to run the race. Their reason and story are an inspiration to us all. Please check out her post on why they are running 13 miles to celebrate 13 years.

As Jeff and I discussed our excitement about the race, I found it so interesting that we have totally different reasons for running and going to Nashville, but the excitement is the same. There are several other people headed south that weekend to run. I can’t wait to get there and to share the story with you afterwards. Until then, I’ve got some training to do!