Chicken Farm
When I was 6 years old we moved out to a 20 acre spread in Springbank, a rural area west of Calgary, Alberta, towards the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The nearest kid my age was Billy Young, who lived about a mile away by field, or 2 miles by road. Billy was a strange [...]
Zen vs. Oblivion
I recently read someone describe himself as “an Ultra runner trying for Zen oblivion.” There seems to be this common misconception about Buddhist meditation as escapism – that it will somehow carry you away as if you were on some sort of cosmic high – completely apart from and oblivious to the world around you. [...]
Black and White
A year ago I was still running roads. An acquaintance of mine ran ultras. We became friends who became good friends who became even better friends, and, after a long time basically fighting it, we ended up lovers. She’s been at the center of my ultra running experience, brief as it thus far is. This [...]
Kista and the Twins, Mt. Wilson Twice
Angeles Forest. The idea was to head down a singletrack that I’ll be following during Mt. D. but Kista & I could’t find access to the trail (and anyhow, it’s all overgrown with poodle dog bush) and took the fireroad down instead. Hot, no shade, amazing smells, 3,000 feet down, and then we reached the [...]
Nanny Goat 2011
Nanny Goat 12hr: 60 miles 7th place overall. Nanny Goat 12/24/100 is run on a 1 mile loop run around a ranch in Riverside It’s a timed race: 12 hours, 24 hours, and, this year, an official 100 miler. I ran the 12 hour race. This would be my second post-50 miler, the first (and [...]
Confronting Fear
There is a guy amongst my acquaintances whose stated ambition as a runner (and perhaps as a man) is “To crush fear in all its forms”. While it might work for him, it seems to me to be the wrong approach to take when confronting fear. I’m not interested in crushing or otherwise defeating fear. [...]
The Old Man & the Wedding
My stepfather and I had not talked in 14 years. Our relationship had never been that terribly close because we’re both suspicious, distrustful characters, and we’d both given up on each other by the time I got to be about 10 years old. My little sister got married last month and the old man and [...]
Ultra
It’s not quite been a year since my friend Buck dared me to run the LA Marathon with her. It had been almost 30 years since I last ran in earnest. For 20 of those 30 years I’d lived a life someone else described as a “bad Larry Clark photograph”. I emerged from it all [...]
400
400 meters was my race. For a few years in my teens, I did not lose a race. Every race went the same. I’d come out of the second turn and hit the final straight having just pulled into the lead. As I’d pull away, I’d hear cheers. This, to me, meant that whoever was [...]
