Founder of sweaty ponytales, a greeting card line for runners, Julie Justison says it’s the experiences she’s had over the years and the friends she’s made that keep her running.

(Feature photo courtesy of sweaty ponytales)

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For her 50th birthday, Julie Justison’s boyfriend gave her a card that read, “New age group, older everything else.”

It was from her sweaty ponytales greeting card line.

While chuckling at the gesture, Julie says she was struck by a realization.

“Wait a minute, I’m in a new age group!” she noted. “It was kind of a nice surprise because I hadn’t thought about it.”

Running Through the Ages

While sweaty ponytales is only a year old, Julie’s running journey started more than 25 years ago. Currently an Arizona resident, Chicago is where she calls home. It’s where she began training on her own and participated in her first race, the Chicago Marathon, in her mid-20s.

After the marathon, she joined the Chicago Area Runners Association (CARA) and began running with local groups. Chicago’s now-established race lineup was just getting started, and Julie ran the first few years of the F^3 Half Marathon and Soldier Field 10.

When she wasn’t racing, she was often pacing. And when Back On My Feet launched in Chicago, Julie helped set up and lead a chapter. Even after moving to Arizona, she returned to pace the Chicago Marathon for a few years.

Julie says it’s the people she’s met and the experiences running has given her that keep her engaged, race after race, year after year.

“It’s just the things that it’s brought into my life,” Julie shares. “I’m also a very talkative, chatty person, so I don’t wear headphones. I talk with people on the run. I have kept in touch with people for probably 20 years that I’ve randomly met at a race. It’s the community — there is nothing freaking like it.”

Those relationships and experiences often led to ideas for greeting cards, including sayings only runners would understand:

Did you win?
Bad words are meant for big hills
I couldn’t have done any of this fuckery without you
Go get your free banana
Be brave enough to suck at something new

“I’m a creative person, and I have a dry sense of humor, so the cards just kind of naturally come spitting out,” Julie says.

Julie tried to launch a greeting card business years ago, and she continued to update and add to her card designs. But it wasn’t until opportunities recently aligned that gave her the push she needed to go all in.

Running In Full Circle

At a surprise party to help Julie celebrate her birthday milestone were runners she’d met throughout various stages of her running journey. Among them was a friend from Chicago, whose friendship and training runs along the Lakefront inspired the name sweaty ponytales.

“He always jokes, ‘It took me two years to realize it was your sweat that was hitting me,’” Julie explains. “He thought it was the lake.”

Full circle moments like these, and realizing the national running community is actually quite connected, have helped Julie build the sweaty ponytales brand. An expo connection here, a retail connection there. Running friends have offered to help with her business plan and legal processes.

Follow @sweatyponytales on Instagram

“I will not say this has been easy. It’s not. I mean, business-wise, it’s very, very difficult,” Julie notes. “But I’m definitely a person who [says], ‘Oh, there’s an ocean there, and I don’t know how to swim? I’m still gonna jump in.’ That’s just what I do.”

Below, Julie shares more about her first experiences in running, a pacing story that went awry — but ended beautifully — and how sweaty ponytales came together.

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What was your first experience with running?

Julie Justison: My stepdad always ran, so I was exposed, just growing up, watching him go out and do his long runs. I’m from Charleston, Illinois, so it’s a town about three hours south of Chicago. He always ran the Chicago Marathon …. On marathon weekend, my mom and I would drive up to Chicago and chase him all around the city. I always thought it was absolutely bonkers.

Then I went away to college. I went to art school, where no sports are really encouraged whatsoever. There was a mile-long track right in front of the plaza. I just started going out there, like once a day, and I would just go once around. I was like, ‘There’s a mile. I’m done.’ And it was something that I started to actually enjoy.

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At what point did the mile become a marathon endeavor?

Julie Justison: I moved out to LA and kept doing the mile. Then I moved to Chicago the fall of ’99. I was probably in my apartment for about a week, and the Chicago Marathon was happening, so my parents came up.

We were sitting at the finish. You could still do the bleachers [in those years] … Somebody collapsed right in front of the bleachers, and a medic was coming out from behind the finish line. I wasn’t aware, at that point then, but if any medical help happened, you didn’t technically finish.

These two runners stopped, and they grabbed this guy’s arms, and they started running. A few people were clapping. And then they collapsed. So two more runners stopped and grabbed this guy’s feet. The other runners get up and still get his arms.

Everybody’s on their feet in the bleachers now, and they carry this guy across the finish line. It gets me so emotional, because I looked at my mom and I just said, ‘I want to be a part of that.’ Like, what a cool community.

I know that running can be such a selfish sport, and I’ve learned that more and more as I’ve done it, but it’s such a community sport as well.

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What have you found most meaningful about being a part of the running community?

Julie Justison: I always laugh when people are like, ‘Well, what’s your favorite race or your favorite experience?’ Every single race, there’s something that happens that has never happened before. If it’s a sound, if it’s a smell.

Getting in Big Sur and coming up over the Bixby Bridge and hearing a piano out there — ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on?’ At Big Sur, you can have four different climate changes going on while you’re running the race.

There are so many magic moments, and people are such an integral part.

When people put their headphones in, you miss out on so much. You miss out on just randomly talking to a stranger as you’re running down the streets of New York. Who knows what’s going to happen? You just never know who you’re gonna talk to.

I just don’t think there’s anything like this.

I’d read about Anne Mahlum, what she’d started in Philly [with Back On My Feet]. I was like, this program is unbelievable. I just thought it was so inspirational. I got wind, finally, maybe two years after reading about her, that it was coming to Chicago. I was on them like crazy — ‘I want to be a group leader, I want to head a house, whatever you need me to do.’ So I launched the Uptown location.

These men, I mean, they changed my life … They taught me so much. Just the friendships that I developed with these men that were, I mean, just down on their luck. I just loved that program.

It’s just the things that [running has] brought into my life … It’s the experience.

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Can you share a running memory that sticks with you?

Julie Justison: It was the third year that I paced [Chicago]. I got so sick. It was like mile 13. I disgraced an alley in Old Town — completely lost it. I ran up to my pacers, and I was like, ‘I’m out. I can’t do this anymore.’ And I pulled off to the side. I found a UPS man who was the only person I could see that had a phone. He let me text my mom, just to say, ‘Don’t look for me. I’m gonna figure out how to get back.’

Right when I took the safety pin off my bib — they asked us to turn our jerseys inside out and drop the pacer sign, of course — I hear this splat. I look in front of me, and it is this elderly man, and he’s fallen in a pothole. Blood is gushing from his nose and his chin.

Two people kind of converge on him, and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, well, I technically kind of work for the marathon today. So let me make sure this guy’s okay.’

I go up and walk with him …. He might have been 78, right under 80. He starts talking, and he’s like, ‘I’ve run every Chicago Marathon since it started. I’m not stopping. I’m going to finish.’

I just put the safety pin back on, and I shoved my hand in his face. I was like, ‘Ron, my name is Julie, and I’m going to get you there.’ So, I ran with him through the rest of the thing.

The most fun I had — again, I think at that point he was one of 12 that had completed every one of [the Chicago Marathons] — I would run up ahead and get to a grandstand and be like, ‘Ron Williams is coming! He’s one of 12 men…’ So by the time he got up there, they’re announcing him. The whole crowd is going crazy.

I called him after we finished the race that night, and I said, ‘Ron, you probably hate me. I’m so sorry, but I had to do it.’ And he goes, ‘Julie, I’ve never had more fun.’

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Your greeting card line sweaty ponytales has been a dream venture of yours for years. How did it come together?

Julie Justison: My first job out of college was for Hallmark Cards …. Cards have kind of always been right there. I’ve always done the very handmade Christmas card.

I had been running maybe four or five years, and I got this idea for a card line …. I developed one, and I just called it On the Sidelines, because I was trying to think of people supporting. They were just black and white. I probably had six or eight cards.

Fleet Feet in Chicago randomly picked them up. I met someone through someone, and the buyer just liked them. And that was something. Then, the director of the expo for the Chicago Marathon at the time, I met with him, and he’s like, ‘Julie, get at the Expo. This is great.’

At that point, cards were about $3 a piece, and the expo space was over $5,000 to show at a 10×10. I mean, I am an art school person, but those numbers don’t mix. So, I put it on the back burner and just thought, ‘Okay, this isn’t something.’

A year and a half ago, with my boyfriend, we were doing the Sedona half marathon, and we had just picked up our bibs at Scottsdale Sole Sports. We went to [lunch] next door. For some reason, I just happened to tell him, ‘Oh yeah, you know those greeting cards that I did?’ I was like, ‘I have an entire line, and I’ve just never done anything with them.’

I pull out this PDF that’s randomly on my phone, and he’s flipping through it, and he just sits there for a second. He’s like, ‘Why the hell aren’t you doing this?’

That opened a little bit of a window.

There are a couple of card makers that I follow on Instagram …. A girl that I had actually found during COVID, she was doing an Instagram takeover for the Greeting Card Associations for this show *Noted, which they put on every spring, and it was in San Francisco. I called my best friend, and I was like…‘I feel like somebody’s trying to tell me something.’ And she goes, ‘Get on a freaking plane.’

I just went over there, and then I just picked people’s brains. I just walked around and was like, ‘I have this crazy idea. How do you do it?’

I came home, and I called Paul Brackey, who is the head of the marathon expo for Chicago, who I’d met 20 years ago. And I was like, ‘Hey, Paul, remember me?’

I launched at Chicago. Didn’t know what I was doing. Bought entirely too many products, drove across the country, set up a booth …. My boyfriend got there on day three of the expo, and walked in, and he got all weepy, and he’s like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but you’ve got to quit your job.’

Learn more about sweaty ponytales here.

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