Adventures in Onionism

My knee may prevent any serious racing for a while due to ITBS (including the 100-miler I'm signed up for this weekend) but I got my grant application in on time, and my dog is better looking than yours. So I've still got that. The perfect hour Pounce Mellow Chew Vertical Chew Fierce Chew Fangs

Well this is jealousy-inducing. My knee is slowly recovering from Zion. I ran/walked only 9.5 miles last week. I'm also in the middle of a 5-presentations-plus-a-grant-application-in-8-days stretch. Sometimes I wish I were unemployed so I wouldn't ever have to go to any meetings and could just Stata all day long. I'm a terrible multi-tasker.

I got back from Utah this morning after going there to run the Zion 100 . Both the course and my performance were underwhelming. If you just look at the pictures, you'll think I am stupid or crazy for not loving the course, but to me it felt like a mix of wide and dusty dirt roads with non-trivial amounts of auto traffic and extremely circuitous slickrock mountain biking trails. Why is that bad? Well, the road thing should be obvious, but mountain bikers seem to enjoy trails that wind back and forth. As a runner, I like to feel like I'm covering ground. Slickrock is also very hard, and since you're constantly winding around around things, and up and over things, it's like running laps around a concrete skate park or something. Hard on the knees, and hard to get in a rhythm as you go in and out of ditches and around around boulders. I flew to Vegas after work Thursday and drove to Virgin, Utah and cowboy camped just outside town. It was stupid of me to take such a lat...

In abundance. Friends Hey little buddy, come out and play! I find that an effective commitment device to get grant proposal writing done is to tell heavy hitters that you're writing the grant, ask them if they want to sign on, and agree to meet with them in two or three days. So that's happening. It's another grant on food stamps research, and I also wrote one for a data science fellowship this week. Fingers crossed. Still, I had time for an excellent 20 mile circumnavigation around Briones Regional Park, as seen above. It rained down here, and snowed in the Sierras! Newts were out in abundance, as were the wildflowers. Lafeyette Ridge Trail is a pretty spectacular roller coaster, if you ever get a chance.