Team Soul Sisters Profile
By Gordon Wright

When Paula Mitchell, 43, tells you - in a soft, friendly voice tinged with a faint southern drawl - that she’s from London, you start wondering if there’s a small town in Texas that bears the name of the English capital.

But no - she means London, England and she’s been an expat for years now.  She and the other half of Team Soul Sisters, Susan Breeden, both live in London with their husbands, who work for British Petroleum and Citigroup.

The pair met in 1999 in Brussels, where their children attended the same school, but they didn’t start running together until Breeden, after a stint in Geneva, joined Mitchell in England in 2003. 

Mitchell by that time had started an informal running club of other London women, and it wasn’t long before Breeden, 50, joined in and started cranking out training runs in Hyde Park and competing with the group in half marathons.

Mitchell, a veteran of the Marathon des Sable, quickly found that Breeden was a natural runner, noting, “She ran a half-marathon four months after she started from scratch and finished in just over two hours.  She’s just a natural.”

Once Breeden caught the running bug (and finished the 2005 London Marathon) there was little in the way of distance or difficulty that fazed Team Soul Sisters.  Together, they ran last year’s TransAlpine Run, and when the TransRockies was announced, “It was a no-brainer that we be here,” according to Breeden.

The duo take pains to point out how supportive their families have been, “When you’re a mom,” explains Breeden, “It’s tough to get away for ten days straight.”

But both believe that setting good examples for their daughters (Mitchell has a seventeen-year-old daughter, as does Breeden, with an 18-year-old to boot) is a primary reason for running the GORE-TEX TransRockies.

“We want to show we have a vital life separate from being a mom and a wife,” notes Mitchell.  “We make healthy lifestyle choices and just try to live life by being good role models.”