Adventures in Onionism

How'd it go in 2025, running-wise?  Volume   As of noon on December 31st, I have run 3,061 miles. That's the most I've ever run in a year, so I feel pretty good about that. I got less vert than I did last year, and have still never cracked 450,000 feet in a year. You can see data from most of the past decade below. (2018 was low thanks to a long summer hike and 2020 had the pandemic, injury, and a long hike.)    2025 Races At the end of 2024 I only planned out   the first half of 2025: my buildup to Hardrock. Not much else in life went according to plan, but the races did: March 8: Seneca Creek Greenway 50K  March 15: Elizabeth Furnace 50K  April 26: Lake Sonoma 50 Miler May 9-10: Hellbender 100 Miler July 11-12: Hardrock 100 Miler   I wasn't quite as fast at Hardrock as I was eight years ago, but I still had a good day.    In the second half of the year I ended up running two more races, where I slightly improved my times over previous ...

Lots of things have happened. Mostly bad, like family voting to traumatize federal employees (side note: It won't help balance the budget! ), my moving back to DC across the country away from Amy, and my colleagues that I worked hard to hire getting fired because consumer protection is bad now. But some good has happened. So here's the good running stuff. The first few months of the year have gone mostly according to plan.  February 8 I drove down to the Wild Oak Trail and started a midnight loop of TWOT. TWOT is a 29-mile loop that has turned into a twice-annual self-supported vaguely Barkley-esque run of one to eight loops. The  website makes it seem much more sadistic then it is (my friend tells me the RD mostly just doesn't know how to update the website to get rid of the "you don't deserve to be here" tone.) I planned to do two loops, including the first with a midnight start. The creek crossing was high, and the rain was cold, so I wimped out and just ...

I tried to run five 100-milers in 2024. The last (UTMR) was cancelled due to landslides that even Swiss engineers couldn't fix quickly, so I ended up with four. February 23: Orcas Island 100 (29:53) June 7-8 Scout Mountain 100 (31:37) July 20: TRT 100 (31:45) August 30: UTMB Mont Blanc (39:26)   In addition, I ran Paiute Meadows 50K (May 11, 5:58) and did the 11-peak version of Desolate Peaks (August 17). I feel like the first half of the year was great--Orcas was early in the year to get me going, a nice social race, and a fun trip to the San Juan Islands and a visit to Seattle friends I hadn't seen in a while. The summer was good, with two hundreds and about two hundred miles in the Brooks Range in Alaska.    Then at UTMB, it was fun to experience the insane Tour de France-like fan crowds once, but I don't think I'll bother trying to get into it again. It was nice to hang out with Lucas' mom Jan in Chamonix, and travel around Switzerland by myself, but UTMR gettin...

That's it, the title is the post. No, of course that's not the post, but I am wondering. My schedule has filled in a bit for the year. I'm now signed up for: Orcas 100 (Feb), Paiute Meadows 50K (May), Scout Mountain 100 (June), TRT 100 (July), and hope to run the fun runs Lupine Loopfest (Feb), Desolate Peaks (August), and Euchre Bar Massacre (October). But the big news is that I got selected in the UTMB lottery. I have until the 29th of January to confirm my registration. For the non-runners: UTMB is a 106-mile loop around Mont Blanc through France, Switzerland, and Italy, starting and ending in Chamonix. By all accounts it is spectacularly beautiful and very difficult, with about 33,000 feet of climbing. For most of my running life I haven't really cared about European races or followed European runners, but I got swept up in the spectacle of it last year. It was the race's 20th year, an American man finally won (Jim), and also finished second (Zack), and Courtney...

2023 Races: I ran five ultras this year. That doesn't seem like all that many to me. Looking back at my Ultrasignup results, I've run a low of four (2014) and a high of eleven (2015) ultras since I got into the sport. (Aside from 2020 when everything was cancelled.) Black Canyon 100K, 60K Double Silver State 50K Western States 100 Crazy Mountain 100 Chicago Marathon Hidden Valley Hammer 10K I was pretty happy with the Black Canyon double in February. It meant my body was finally back to normal after Tor in 2022. (I'm not happy that there was absolutely no recognition by the race org of the double, despite promises to the contrary, so I'll just keep howling into the void about that--add it to my "Just serve soy sauce flavored ramen. It's vegetarian and tastes just as salty!" evergreen ultra complaint.) I was happy with Silver State 50K until the day after when my hamstring threw a fit. I think I can no longer run a race the day after a nine-hour drive. I wa...

Strava says I ran 1,934 miles in 2022. I wanted to step down a bit from my 2,650 miles in 2021, but not by that much. I got about the same vert that I usually get (300K) without really focusing on it. I was pretty happy with my running for most of the year. I set a marathon PR in December 2021 but as usual I did not really convert that into trail speed. I ran these races in 2022: January: Calico 50K February: Sean O'Brien 100K February: Yucca Valley 5K April: Cherry Blossom 10-miler  June: San Diego 100-miler July: Standhope 100-miler September: Tor des Geants 220-miler November: Mountain Masochist 50K (50-miler DNF) I did fine but not great at June and July 100's, and then I did quite well at Tor. It was an amazing experience, but it took a lot out of me. So much so that I didn't run for a solid month, and then when I tried to start up again a few weeks after that, I had to downgrade from the 50-mile to the 50K at Mountain Masochist in November. (I slept very poorly the ni...

Alright, here are the races I'm planning to run this year. For whatever reason I've really got my mind set on Tor this year, but it's lottery-dependent. I'm told I can buy/charity-donate my way in if I don't get picked, though. It's time for another 200-miler, and a gorgeous one in Italy that was Lucas' favorite sounds like a good one. It's also time for the pandemic to be over so I can get back out there for a full year of racing, plus international travel, and maybe a couple concerts. So obviously this plan is full of contingencies. Sunrise Bold =already registered  *=Western States qualifier  January 23: Calico 50K  February 5: Sean O’Brien 100K*  February 26: Yucca Valley 5K (ha!) March 8-10: Barkley (waitlist, very unlikely)  April 3: Cherry Blossom 10 Miler April 7-10: Istria 100M (Croatia, currently unlikely to actually do this.)  May 7: Wild Wild West Marathon/50M (Lone Pine, unlikely due to travel plans) May 21: Bishop High Sierra 50M/...

 2021 is over, even if the pandemic isn't.  Strava says I ran 2654 miles and gained 315,000 feet of vertical over 573 hours. That's the most miles I've ever run, about 50 more than in 2019. Coming off an injury year and still in a pandemic, I'm very happy about that. And at the end, I was very happy to pull off a PR. More on that below. I ran 8 races: Canyons 100K (16:00) Capital Backyard (25 hours, 104.16 miles) Black Hills 100M (28:32) Kodiak 100K (17:40) Mogollon Monster 100M (31:42) Cuyamuca 100K (14:11) Euchre Bar Massacre (Missed cutoff after 5 Hills, like usual) California International Marathon (2:59:18, PR! ) I never wrote up reports on Cuyamuca or Euchre Bar. I started training seriously for CIM right after Mogollon Monster, so I wasn't even sure why I had signed up for Cuyamuca, but I was glad I did it. It was a really pretty drive there through some places I'd never been, it was easy camping in the car walking distance from the start, and it was a pr...