My 2019 was a year of contradictions, marked in equal measure by thrilling successes and crushing failures. I raced my longest-distance race to date at the Forget the PR 50K and I got a new full marathon PR one month later at The Flying Pig … but I also experienced the longest furlough in my running career after breaking my ankle. Continue reading The Year That Was: 2019
And then there was the Pig. 29 days after running my first 50k, I ran my eighth full road marathon. I seemed to recover fairly quickly from the Forget the PR Mohican 50k, so it didn’t seem entirely crazy to put all of this season’s speed work to the test at the Flying Pig Marathon roughly one month later. There were complications from the very start of this year’s Flying Pig, though, so it quickly became clear that this was not going to be my day to run a 3:20-3:30 marathon. Continue reading Race Report: The Flying Pig Marathon
I blinked and April was over. In what seemed like no time at all, my first 50k was in the record books and I had already returned to training with the BERunProject team. Since the turn of the year, I’ve run 626 miles, pedaled 676 miles with Peloton and spent about 14 hours in semi-private personal training sessions at Beyond Exercise. That’s a combined 135 hours worth of training over the last 18 weeks … all while continuing to observe #nodaysoff. Continue reading Four Months In And #NoDaysOff
After training for 18 weeks, 539 miles and 22,675 feet of vertical gain, I finally completed my first ultra distance on Saturday, April 6, 2019. The weather was just about perfect for the Forget the PR Mohican 50k, which is held in northern Ohio’s expansive Mohican State Park each spring. While not everything went according to plan during the race, I still had an awesome time in a surprisingly beautiful part of my home state. Continue reading Race Report: Forget the PR Mohican 50k
Bon Iver’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring 2019 tour passed through Cincinnati on March 31st and the show provided the perfect opportunity to bid bon voyage to a hard winter. Despite occupying space in my record collection for over a decade, this was the first time that I’ve actually seen Justin Vernon and company in concert. Continue reading Spring Beckons With Bon Iver
We are now less than two weeks out from race day and my highest-mileage weeks of this training season are officially behind me. I topped out at 50.1 miles for the week of March 18-24, which included Saturday’s 21-miler. Continue reading The Road To 50k: Taper Time
The Spring Equinox is here and the Midwest is finally starting to show signs of life again. The days are getting noticeably longer and hints of green are starting to emerge from beneath the ever-present muck of this year’s cold, wet winter. Continue reading The Road To 50k: Signs Of Life
This weekend marked the return of Cincinnati’s Bockfest, an annual series of events that celebrate the coming of Lent and – eventually – spring. It’s old Zinzinnati’s German Catholic heritage at its finest and the festivities begin with a delightfully absurd parade on Friday evening that’s filled with monks on Segways, sausage queens, goats and goatmen, and casks of blessed bock beer. Continue reading The Road to 50k: Back To Bockfest
My family relocated from Cincinnati to Seattle for a brief time in the mid-1980s. My parents packed up me, my infant sister, and our West Highland Terrier into the family Astrovan and we proceeded to make the drive from Ohio to Washington. It was my first taste of cross-country adventure, my first exposure to our National Parks, and my first introduction to the true size and scope of these United States of America. Continue reading The Road to Rainier: There And Back Again
I wasn’t always a runner. Although I’ve engaged in what you might call endurance sports (specifically cycling and hiking) for most of my adult life, my running career didn’t begin until 2013. Prior to that, running was a gym class punishment at best. It was a schoolyard humiliation, not something I willingly did for hours on end. Continue reading The Road To 50k: First Steps
Run, Kamandi, Run! 