Dena Evans joined runcoach in July, 2008 and has a wide range of experience working with athletes of all stripes- from youth to veteran division competitors, novice to international caliber athletes.
From 1999-2005, she served on the Stanford Track & Field/ Cross Country staff. Dena earned NCAA Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Year honors in 2003 as Stanford won the NCAA Division I Championship. She was named Pac-10 Cross Country Coach of the Year in 2003-04, and West Regional Coach of the Year in 2004.
From 2006-08, she worked with the Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative, helping to expand the after school fitness programs for elementary school aged girls to Mountain View, East Menlo Park, and Redwood City. She has also served both the Stanford Center on Ethics and the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession as a program coordinator.
Dena graduated from Stanford in 1996.
Tina hails from Amesbury, a small town in England near Salisbury and Stonehenge. From an all-girls high school, she went on to St. Hilda’s College at University of Oxford, where she studied metallurgy and material science. After graduation, she got into programming, and eventually came to the United States in 1985. Tina now works for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, in a division that manages small business credit. She’s married to a husband who runs, and enjoys hanging out on Ocean Beach with her English chocolate Lab, who doesn’t. On Superbowl Sunday, she used her home field advantage well, finishing the Kaiser Half-Marathon in 1:32:45, her fastest Half in seven years and quick enough for fifth place age group honors.
Tom lives outside of Boston in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he writes computer programs that pick stocks for a money management firm. Because his company did well enough relative to the market in 2008, he remains in good enough humor to serve as our January 2009 Athlete in Focus.
Tom grew up in nearby Storrs, Connecticut before moving on to Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York and then Harvard for graduate school in Computer Science. He has two kids, aged 16 and 13, and is engaged to be married this February. Tom also holds the distinction of beating Tom McGlynn in a race (Philadelphia Marathon 2006), when he set his personal best of 3:21.
Helen Kao is Assistant Professor of Medicine in Geriatrics at UC San Francisco Medical
School. She has been a regular member of the Palo Alto Focus-N-Fly group for over two years. Helen is coming off of a very successful fall, including a personal best of 3:15:26 at the Twin Cities
Marathon in October. She also likes to do hand stands.
Michael Shafto is a 39 year-old engineer at Applied Materials in Austin Texas. Michael has been married for 15 years, with three kids, ages 5,7, and 8. He began running in middle school PE, when one of the track coaches saw him running and asked him to turn out for the team. He competed in track and cross country in high school near Houston, managing a 4:52 mile on a sprint focused team, and during which time he “got my butt kicked a lot.”
Lisbet Sunshine grew up in New York City, before graduating from Yale University in 1986. Following graduation, she moved out to San Francisco as an alternative to moving back to New York. A friend’s crash pad provided an initial couple months’ security while out on the West Coast, and 23 years later, northern California has become home. Lisbet works as the Director of Government and Community Relations for San Francisco State University, part of a twenty year stretch working in politics and government. She is married with three kids, aged 5,5, and 7.
On October 4th at the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon, Lisbet qualified for an amazing fifth Olympic Marathon Trials with a 2:45:11 clocking. She took a few moments with Focus-N-Fly after a busy Halloween weekend.
Originally from Spokane, Washington, JR Roberts crossed the Cascades to attend the University of Washington after graduation from University High. With a focus on zoology and chemistry while at UW, he initially worked in a vet clinic, and credits his science background with allowing him to communicate effectively with clients in his current position at a medical device company that provides treatment ports for cancer patients. JR has been married for five years and has two older sisters. He also has a pug, whom he describes as more of a “400 meter specialist.”
Angie grew up in Ottawa, Canada, where she studied Mechanical Engineering at Queen’s University. After graduation, she worked for a management consulting company in Toronto for a few years before coming to Stanford for business school. Although she thought she would only stay those two years, she remains a San Francisco resident. After earning her MBA, she had dream of trying to hit the Olympic qualifying mark in the marathon for Athletics Canada, but injuries held her training back. She tried to do an Ironman, got injured more, and as she puts it, it was “time to go get a ‘real job’.” After a stint in venture capital, Angie now works as the Director of Product and Business Development at Ruba, an online travel startup that does lead generation for tours.
Gloria grew up in Houston, Texas, and has been married since 1969. She and her husband Raul have two kids: a daughter, who works as a surgical tech, and a son who graduated from Texas A&M and is stationed with the Navy in Spain. Gloria is a retired (December 2008) postal service employee and her husband, who grew up near Brownsville, Texas, is a truck driver for a concrete company. Gloria joined Focus-N-Fly through its partnership with the 2010 Aramco Houston Half Marathon, which she completed successfully in January.
Kevin O’Brien is a resident of Fall River Mills, California (70 miles east of Redding), where he manages dispatch logistics and fertilizer billing for McArthur Farm Supply. Kevin grew up in Corning, California, before heading to Chico State University, where he graduated in 1999. Kevin has been married for nearly six years to his wife, Georgia (who coincidentally is Coach Dena’s first cousin), and has two young kids. One August day last year at a family gathering, Dena encouraged Kevin to try Focus-N-Fly as he and a few other family members where planning to attempt the Long Beach Half Marathon and he tended to do so much of his running alone in the small town where he resides.
Shaluinn grew up in southern California, where she has been running since she was 5 years old. As she puts it, she has been running longer than fellow FNF’er and recent “In the Hunt” blogger Brooke Wells has been alive! Shaluinn graduated from Louisville High School in 1996, where she helped the team to a Division IV state cross country state championship her senior year. Shaluinn attended and competed for Stanford, where she graduated in 2000 with a degree in American Studies. After several years at Google, where she currently is Product Marketing Manager for Google Apps, she took the 2008-09 school year to complete a Master’s degree in Management at the Stanford GSB’s Sloan program. Married to fellow Googler Ramsey Allington, Shaluinn lives in Palo Alto.
