Bourbon Chase Relay

                                                                                                    
This past Saturday, Cheryl ran into a couple friends at the gym who were complaining about the weather. After all, we don’t tend to have loads of tornado warnings and monsoon-like rains in October. But, so far, this fall has been “special.”
“Well,” said one friend, “at least we’re not running across the state of Kentucky.”
“Really,” [...]

More Things to Complain About!

Hi everyone! I haven’t written a blog in 3 months! Did anyone notice? Anyone? Trent?
I felt like a brain break from running. Not an actual break from running (horrors!), but a space of time where I couldn’t care less about thinking/blogging/facebooking/logging/tweeting/bragging/advising/arguing about running. As we all know, running is stupid. I’m the first one to [...]

Did Not Finish/Did Not Hurl: A Stellar Weekend of Racing!

 
Part One: Did Not Finish

 
Twenty-four years ago, I never really kept track of mileage, followed training “plans,” or worried about things like, say, a stabbing pain in my ankle that could make my hair stand on end about 30 minutes into a run. I just liked to run a lot and lump all injuries into the [...]

Play

A few weeks ago, I ran a 5k race with a 6th-grade girl (“Erin”) as a volunteer with the Girls on the Run program. Like most of her classmates/teammates in the program, Erin was totally uninterested in the foolish concept of running for the sake of running. But if the running was connected to something fun like, say, [...]

A Terrifically Circuitous Race Report

 

Some eons ago, I used to run now and then with a group of women in the Bay Area. The abilities in the group varied wildly, as did the temperments. But it was good to have the camaraderie of other female runners in an age where it was becoming more and more popular to (erroneously) believe that if [...]

Fun Conversations with Non-Runners

Did he just say “a 5k marathon”? Aaaagghh! My ears!!
A YEAR OR SO AGO, Cheryl and I were out having 5000 margaritas when we ran into a client of hers (finance world…just writing the word “finance” has already bored me too much to describe what she actually does.) He was a convivial little fat man dressed [...]

The “Just Finish” Boom….

 

 
Originally, this was going to be a blog about Resolution Runners. You know, the ones who trot out and buy $900 dollars’ worth of running gear, sign up for 17 races, buy a gym membership, and then flail away on the treadmill maybe 3 times before concluding that running is downright dangerous and, gosh darn [...]

The One. The Only. The Monkey.

 
About two and a half years ago, I was 20-25 pounds overweight, I had just run a half marathon at an all-time embarrassing pace, and I hadn’t even whispered the word “marathon” in nearly half a decade. Nonetheless, when Cheryl came across a website for The Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon, a marathon pleasantly described [...]

Stick Man, 1969

 

Back in 1969 when I was 8 years old, our family lived in a tiny apartment in Ann Arbor while my dad was in grad school at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!! or whatever). Those were groovy times. Hippies for days all around the campus,  war protests every fifteen minutes, the Summer of Love (really important to [...]

But Enough About Me. What do YOU Think About Me?

“That’s great, Echo. But get a load of this!”
This may come as a real shock to some of you, but believe it or not, some of us runners enjoy talking about ourselves. Incessantly and dramatically. Particularly immediately (and I mean instantly) after a race. I recall with fondness, and still just a hint of ire, the festival of [...]