Adventures in Onionism

I ran my third Hardrock in July. Here's the report. Before   I flew from Fairbanks, Alaska to Durango, Colorado a week before the race. I got my rental car and drove to Silverton. The next day (July 4) I picked up my race gear that I mailed to my friends' house in Ouray. I ran the Telluride to Kroger's Pass section of trail. The climb went well, but on the way down my quads started to burn so I deliberately took it easy. I spent the evening with friends in Norwood, CO. I drove over to Lake City and did the Sherman climb the next day. My legs were unfortunately quite toasted from the Kroger's climb the day before, but of course I could still hike.  The next day the air quality was terrible. Did I mention there was a fire? The Gold Mountain Fire started under 1/4 from my friends' house in Ouray about a week prior. Thankfully that's on the east side of town and prevailing winds kept pushing it east away from town. Of course that means it took a lot of wilderness wi...

  Just a little bit hotter and a little bit worse! I finished my second Hardrock last week. It was a fun experience. I ran 1 hour 47 minutes slower than my 2017 time (in the same counter-clockwise direction) but it was a million degrees hotter, the course is two miles longer, and I took an additional 1.6-mile wrong turn. I placed essentially the same: 35th this time, 36th last time. I feel like I normally finish as the median runner, but when the going gets  very  tough, I do relatively better. I think the easiest explanation might just be that elevation wrecks some really good runners and I barely notice it up to 13,000 feet. Thanks, genetics. Or, when a race is high enough and steep enough that almost everyone is hiking, I'm a relatively fast hiker with better endurance. Regardless, it worked out reasonably well for me again. Training I've been telling myself since last October that I should hire a coach to write a training plan for me, or at least write a plan myself. ...

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 ...