Adventures in Onionism

I've driven 6500 miles in the past forty days. Fun road trips with MRB and gf for sure, but I'm calling for a six-month moratorium on road-tripping. Badlands, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Parks, Cloud Peak, Fitzpatrick, and Gros Ventre wilderness areas, plus Santa Barbara, Bighorn, and Western States 100 milers. (I ran the first two and paced at the third.) But man I am tired of driving. Good thing you can only fly to Iceland, since I'm headed there on Wednesday. And hopefully in six months I'll be OK with more driving, because I think my truck needs to go to Baja during winter break.

Update: I'm in the middle of a trip to Wyoming. I bought a truck in Cali, left the same day, and drove to the Wind River range where I promptly got stuck in snow. Then I ran 100 miles in the Bighorns and didn't vomit, which is a cause for celebration. One more week in WY, pacing Nano at Western States, then 26 days in Iceland. I'm revising an accepted public health article and working on a numerous-author paper on soccer refs (more a project on research transparency, really) all the while, that just doesn't lend itself to photos as well.

Barkley 100 from Brendan Young on Vimeo . ht amy

1) The Condor Trail . Put this together with the Bigfoot Trail and you've got a whole new way to walk the length of California that isn't the PCT. 2) Put a USB battery pack in one of your later dropbags at a 100 miler, just before where you would expect your GPS watch to die. Also the cord that connects your GPS watch to a USB charging station. Also a cheap-o regular watch. Then, when your Garmin is nearly dead, get to the aid station, leave the Garmin on, plug it in to charge it, toss all that junk in your pack, and put on the cheap watch so you know what's going on for the next hour and a half. After an hour or so, your watch is recharged and will finish out the race, and you'll have a single complete data file for a hundred miler. My particular Garmin doesn't look like it's recording data while it's charging, but I'm told this works. I'll definitely give it a whirl. Thanks for the tip, Marshall!

I ran the Santa Barbara 100 (née DRTE 100 ) this weekend. It took me just shy of 32 hours, which is my slowest 100 mile time of the eight I've attempted thus far. The website says the course had 21,000 feet of climbing, but the website says a lot of things--it certainly felt like more. I was a little worried that the race wouldn't be well-organized, as there were numerous last-minute changes as well as promised updates that never materialized, but in the end what really matters (course marking and aid stations) was all quite well done. There was one instance where maybe 10 of us made a wrong turn thanks to a vandal removing flagging (the adjacent private property owner being a turd?), but since I was going slower I didn't go that far off track before others came back in the opposite direction and corrected me. It was an out and back and the flagging was restored on the return leg. Also, the aid stations had plenty of ice, which is saying something given the heat. A few of t...