CLAUDIA TABOADA's

Hello World ! Welcome to my Travel and Fitness Blog 

As you may have read in the About Page, I am an autism mom, a former labour and employment attorney and a runner and new triathlete.  Although I wasn’t born with super human athletic genes nor did I do track or any type of serious sports in high school or university, I fell in love with running as it became my outlet and my way to cope with having a child on the autism spectrum. I started running in the summer of 2009 and did my first 5K in October of that year. The month after that, I ran a 10K and since then I haven’t looked back.  I truly enjoy training, working out and pushing myself.  Being active allows me to keep mentally and physically strong to be the best special needs mom I can be.  It is my sanctuary and the ”ME’ time that allows me to simply be ”with myself” and an intrinsic part of my self-care which I neglected for a VERY long time.  Exercising,  whether it is just jogging outside in the snow or training hard-core for triathlons, enables me to live a healthy lifestyle and ultimately be the best person I can be.

One of the main reasons, I started this blog was to inspire some of you and share with you my passion for travelling the world for fitness: racing marathons first, but many more adventures are to come.  This passion actually started ”out of necessity”.  At the time I began my travel and racing odyssey, I was homeschooling my autistic son Nicolas. I was with him 24/7. I was not only his mom but his therapist, his speech pathologist, his occupational therapist and his teacher – and I was literally going insane (as in ”almost having a mental breakdown insane”). Around the same time, my husband was travelling almost every week and was accumulating the air miles. So the agreement was made that at least twice a year, I would go off some place new to run a marathon in order to have a mommy break and have some ME time. And that’s how the journey started (and saved my sanity in the process !). 

Out of the 21 marathons that I have raced, 2 have been in my hometown of Montreal. 5 have been in other Canadian cities and 14 have been around the world: 7 in Europe, 6 in the USA and 1 in Asia. Of course this love for travelling and racing is what attracted me to embark on the Abbott World Marathon Majors journey, which will end next year as I run my final Major – the Boston Marathon. As I add triathlon to my fitness resume, I’m sure that I will be looking to add some international triathlons as well as some cycling and triathlon training camp trips to the mix .  

In this blog, I will be detailing my Abbott World Marathon Majors journey and also feature some bucket list destination marathons to make you dream and inspire your individual journeys. Since most of my international travel adventures are usually short – 5 days or less – I have become an extremely efficient marathon/fitness traveller and tourist. I’ve also done most of my trips solo and have organized most logistics myself.  Hoping to share some travel wisdom and tips in here as well.  

Finally this blog will also have a training and lifestyle component. I will try to give you some insight into my training, specially as I embark on my quest to become the best runner I can be and try to qualify for Boston 2020 IN Boston next year.  I also hope to have some guest bloggers who will enlighten you with their expertise on several training and lifestyle topics such as sleep, best recovery Yoga moves, swim strength training exercises, etc… Read on and ENJOY !!!!