The Rush of it All

"Seems to me that I have in the past few years been so nibbled and pushed by light minds and troubled by tiny things that I have been constantly off balance. Large things I can stand up to. I think most people can — I believe that men are destroyed by little things—so little that they can’t be got at or even identified—the nibbling of ducks. A large demand may stimulate—a thousand small ones only...

Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. —T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets" I waited to make this post, to let the emotions of race weekend settle and to absorb the reality that a cancelled 100-mile race is not much in the larger scheme of things. There are far, far worse things happening in the world. It felt tragic in the moment, but we will all be just fine. In the moment, at 4:30 Saturday morning...

On our trip west last month, we shared a flight with a contingent of Boy Scouts bound for Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. Seeing them started me thinking about my own visit to Philmont, and me being me, I did the math and realized that this month is the 45th anniversary of that expedition. So I went digging in my archives and found a little narrative I wrote about part of the adventure for a c...

I ran the Bighorn Trail Run last weekend, a 100-miler in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The associated travel back to Pennsylvania ended on Tuesday with a long day of driving and flying and driving some more. On Wednesday morning, I woke into a familiar post-ultra stillness. The trip was over. My crew, the people I’d just spent so much time with, were back to their day jobs. The emotional highs of t...

15 years ago I was a dedicated road runner, training for yet another marathon. But partway through a random run, I followed an impulse and turned left instead of right, off of the road and into my first real trail run. Here’s what I wrote about it back then (quotes are from my journal, April 10, 2009): I had a great run last evening.  It started the same as last Thursday – dropped Lucas at soccer...

Today, another 20th-anniversary relic. Back in 2003 we were still writing (and mailing) an annual family Christmas letter, and I’ve always thought that this one does a good job of capturing the feeling of that period. [Quotes are from my journal, photos were not part of the original letter.] Dear Family and Friends, I hope you are all well, and I wish you happy holidays. I t’s a most unusual seaso...

In part 1, I was using the prospect of a post-deployment marathon to give focus to my running during a tour of duty in Iraq, and I was beginning to see running as a “throughline” that tied my pre-war past to my post-war future. When I left off, we were nearing the end of a long, hot summer in southern Iraq, redeployment was imminent, and the Philadelphia Marathon was on tap for November. Then: Her...

Welcome to everyone who subscribed after my last post: There were a lot of you — thanks! That post drew more attention than anything I’ve published here before, and I’m heartened by the fact that so many people shared concern about the situation and were willing to speak up about it. In the interest of fairness, I want to acknowledge that UTMB gave a prompt and professional reply to our organizati...

If you aren’t tuned-in to the politics of ultrarunning (maybe you didn’t even know there was such a thing as politics in ultrarunning), you probably missed the drama that surfaced in our community late last week. The very short version of things is that a well-respected and beloved 100-mile race in the mountains of British Columbia (Whistler Alpine Meadows), directed by widely respected and belove...

This week, 20 years ago… It’s amazing how your life can change from one minute to the next.  Yesterday morning we were gathered in the office talking about going home, thinking that we were weeks away from it, fully expecting to be completely home by mid-October at the latest.  I had firm plans for a marathon in November, and football tickets, and just being in Pennsylvania for the fall. Five minu...

It’s UTMB weekend, so I thought I’d share this account of my own experience at Chamonix, one of the high points of my running career (published originally on my website on September 1, 2021). So back in 2017, I ran the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc. UTMB is a 105-mile race around the Mont Blanc massif. It starts in Chamonix, France and goes counter-clockwise around the mountain through Italy, into Swi...

Western States is over… now what? If you’ve been with me here for long, you know that the only thing I’ve been writing about lately is my preparation for Western States, the iconic 100-mile trail race I finally made it into this year.  You’ll also realize that the race was 3 weeks ago and I haven’t yet published a final capstone report about it. The fact is, I’ve been slumping since the race, mire...

This is the fourth installment in a series about my upcoming Western States Endurance Run adventure. My intent is to give you a look behind the curtain, to maybe demystify this ultra thing, and show how fairly normal people go about doing big things. We each have our own approach, but I imagine every successful ultrarunner uses some version of a process something like this one. I also imagine ther...

The fallow was largely philosophical. Not so the train-up. This phase is all physiology, all about pushing hard to get strong. In short, it’s time to shut up and run. But not without a plan… Begin with the end in mind I have goals for this race (a finish, a 100-mile PR, a sub-24-hour finish) but those aren’t particularly helpful for building a training plan. So let’s restate: to go sub-24, I need...

Ritual humility, pragmatic utility (7 weeks of restful regeneration in deference to the power of processes I don’t fully understand, but choose to trust anyway)... Fallowing. The first phase of my preparation for the Western States Endurance Run — 7 weeks of “restful regeneration” and intentional restraint, in deference to the power of processes I don’t fully understand, but choose to trust anyway...

In June I'll be running the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run (on the 25th anniversary of our 1st marathon). Here's how I'm preparing... Twenty-five years ago today, Renee and I made a pivotal life decision. On that day, January 18th, 1998, we decided that we were (or would become) long-distance runners. My only record of it is this little note in my datebook from that year: * Berlin: visited...

Here, in no particular order, are some of the reasons I love night running… Moon shadows! These delightful wonders aren’t that rare if you’re watching for them, but they’re especially magical on the coldest of cold winter nights, when a thick and reflective ultra-white crust buries the details of the forest floor, and a low-and-bright Wolf Moon sends out those long, deep and distinct shadows.  The...

I seek first to understand, and I do penance and mitigation for his sins, I plant and plant... This 25-year-old rant is from another time and place (it’s NOT about my current neighbors), but it still feels fresh and true to me. I was reminded of it this week as I was admiring the trees on my current little lot, the ones that were here before me and the ones I’ve planted, noticing how big some of t...

Not everything, but it's almost always better to keep moving forward (my recovery after running IMTUF, a 100-mile trail race in Idaho)... Running fixes things.  It’s a simple statement that can apply to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.  It’s also a broad philosophy that I could take in many directions, literal and metaphoric. Today, though, I’m thinking of it as a physical...

Earnest effort, the call, obligations that pull us back to shore (and Cormac serendipity)... It was Thursday — Writing the Rush day — and all I had were a couple mildly interesting (to me) snippets from the past two weeks, and they weren’t coming together into a post. The first was about earnest effort and engagement.  After an intense (and highly successful) race weekend that capped nearly a year...

Most ultra-runners are also philosophers, and one of the fundamental questions of our sport is… Why? I have no definitive answer, but I did start a list a while back [originally published here: My running whys (Pandemic Diary - day 249 ) ]. It’s a draft, and incomplete, but for me it feels like a good and honest start. 1. Good Animal First be a good animal. There are other interpretations of Emers...

A dominant primordial beast, eligible to burst forth (I suspect it of you)... Today, another favorite short piece revisited (with audio). I was about to call the “piece” an “essay”, but that’s probably a stretch… it feels more like maybe a prose poem (I’m not clear on these categories). Whatever it is, I’m happy with it, I think it says what I wanted to say, in the spirit I wanted to say it, and l...

I move by force of will, he moves by force of wonder. (Running with a childe, pulling yourself forward into the wind, looking out.) I’m feeling nostalgic today, so I’m revisiting an essay I wrote for Runner’s World way back in 1999. They didn’t publish it, but I still like it (maybe more now than I did then — I think it’s aged well). I hope you will, too. A Running Start Written March 22, 1999. I...

This essay was originally published as “In the Long Run” in the Fall 2020 issue of Eat Clean, Run Dirty Magazine . I’ve added my own photos for this version. Intimate Places We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets Familiarity… It’s subtle, this knowing , and it sneaks in. ...

The look in the eye, the set of the body — you’re gazing upon something fundamental to our nature, something fundamentally powerful and good. Restoring my faith in the basic soundness of our species... I talked last time ( There I was… ) about the importance of telling stories. There are many ways to do that, but sometimes the very best stories have no words. Sometimes the best story is on the fac...