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Hillary Rodham Clinton will officially announce shes a candidate for the presidency on Sunday, but shes been running in place for the better part of two years.

Clinton was only out of the State Department a few months in the late spring of 2013, a period shes often described as one of apolitical reflection, relaxation and recharging, when friends began fielding interesting phone calls from her D.C. mansion, known as Whitehaven. One person in Clintons orbit at the time recalls picking up the phone and hearing Hello! Its Hillary! followed by a barrage of detailed queries about the organizational health of state parties in two key presidential battleground states Florida (bad) and Ohio (much, much worse).

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Thats when I knew she was going to do it, said the person, who also recalled sitting through one Im-never-doing-this-again conversation with Clinton after the 2008 election. To me she was always basically a yes, and wanted people to make the case for no. But the case for yes was always stronger.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served as national party chairman during Bill Clintons second term, had a similar experience this time the topic was African-American politics a couple of months later at the June 2013 funeral of longtime Philadelphia congressman Bill Gray.

She asked me a lot of questions about people who attended that would only have been relevant for someone who would make use of those connections in the future as a candidate for office, he said. It was a surprise to me that she had made up her mind so early.

Around the same time, Clinton joined Twitter, and made her intentions tantalizingly unclear, describing herself as Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD

Even if most people around Clinton knew she would run, the candidate-to-be left that TBD deliberately open for months leaving herself latitude to ditch the entire enterprise if she got cold feet or faced a serious Democratic challenger. Its axiomatic to the point of clich to say that Clinton, the instant Democratic frontrunner, has wanted to be the first woman president since earliest girlhood in Chicago. The idea that she is unquenchably ambitious has embedded itself in the American consciousness, in part because she has been less artful about cloaking it in part because its true. In its 2016 Clinton kickoff skit, Saturday Night Live fabricated a 1940s sonogram of in-utero Hillary Rodham waving a campaign sign.

The truth is considerably more complicated. Clinton is dead-set on avoiding the mistakes of 08, and approved a series of secret reports studying the 2008 campaign in minute detail, friends and advisers say. But for all her calculation, shes been surprisingly noncommittal and reluctant to leave her comfortable double-mansion life for the grinding, grubby, lacerating realities of another campaign, fully exposed to the media horde she fears, loathes and fights.

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Hillary Clinton's slow walk to 'yes'