Colette and Elise O’Leary are star runners on the Milton High School track team. Their parents met on the team in the early 1980s.

Sparks flew when Walter and Tara O’Leary of Milton, Massachusetts, first met. But it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.

He was a sprinter on Milton High School’s boys track & field team. She was a distance runner and captain of Milton’s girls team.

“We would kind of just give each other a hard time about who had the harder races and the harder workouts, and we actually did not get along when we first met,” Tara O’Leary told Runner’s World by phone. “It was much more that we liked to insult each other, I guess.”

But as they spent more time together, their feelings changed. In January of 1982, during their senior year of high school, they went on their first date. Walter and Tara have been together ever since.

Read more about our local runners in Runners World.