Hello, my name is Joe Werner I am the Oak Forest site coordinator of Cara’s marathon training program in the southwest suburbs.  Along with your group leaders I want to welcome you to our website and hopefully to our training site. Cara offers the best training program in all of Chicagoland.  It is my opinion that our site has the most dedicated group leaders.  We are big enough that a group surrounds everybody and still small enough that your group leaders will know your name.  I will know your name and your face, though sometimes I have trouble putting them together. This makes our site the best site Cara has. We run from Yankee Woods, which is located at 165th and Central ave in Oak Forest.  We run through Tinley Park, Orland Park and eventually run into Palos Heights.  Announcements start around 6:45am, which allows our runs to start promptly at 7:00am.

Our website will hold a calendar of events that we plan. We will start our year off on Friday June 6 when we will gather around a campfire and get to know each other. We will also recognize our racing teams for past victories.  With help of my family along with others will serve breakfast after one of our runs.  We will bike the Marathon course a few weeks before the race.  We will run the last six miles of the course in advance to become one with the finish line. At the end of Cara’s ready to run 20 miler we hope to have grills grilling food. Each week we will post a runner of the week and will add a short bio of a group leader.

We all have different reasons for running marathons.  I ran my first marathon because I had a fire in my heart that I could not put out.  I had a voice shouting in my head that I could not muffle.  For some unknown reason I had a need to do something that was unheard of in my family, I needed to prove to myself, that I could run a marathon. Over the years I found out that running the marathon is easy.  It is preparing for a marathon that is hard.  If I stay healthy this will be my 10th Chicago Marathon, whether I ran an 11th depends on you.  The fire is still there and I still hear the voice but it is the spirit that I see in each of you that keeps me coming back.  I look forward to seeing all of you.  I will do whatever I can to help make this journey we are about to undertake a positive experience for all of you.  If I can help in anyway all you have to do is ask.

Joe Werner
GoKarts@Juno.com