Writing

I started rock climbing because it freed me from the monotony of training for sprint kayak. Climbing on rock is athletic and inspiring, and takes you to beautiful places. It can also be dangerous. Your decisions matter when you’re hanging from tired fingers far off the ground. The danger and the ticking clock of your tired muscles forces you to make each next move quickly and intuitively. Think too hard and you’ll start to get tired. Get too tired and you’ll fall. These consequences force me to fight my tendency to reduce sport to a plodding checklist. ...

Last Spring, while preparing for my attempt on the Rainier Infinity Loop, I bought two books on Mt Rainier… and failed to read either of them. My invite to that adventure had come out of nowhere; I knew nothing about the park, the area, the mountain or its history, and it felt important to develop some sense of the mountain I planned on running over and around. So I bought The Challenge of Rainier, a collection of trip reports by Dee Molenaar, and The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, by Bruce Barcott, an environmental journalist from Washington. They lived on my desk for months, untouched. I contemplated bailing on the trip - I wasn’t prepared! I was only running a few times a week! Actually reading the books represented a commitment I wasn’t sure I wanted to make. ...

I recently ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time in my life, a decision that would have shocked and disappointed the straight-edged sprint kayaker I used to be. And I’m alive! I’m sane! My goal was to have some sort of spiritual experience; or, more accurately, to figure out how consuming a molecule produced by a mushroom, or any drug, really, could possibly be a spiritually significant act. I’d done enough research to realize that my skepticism was probably unfair. Michael Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” had made me aware of the modern wave of research into psychedelics as miracle cure for all sorts of conditions, from anxiety, to PTSD in soldiers, to fear of death in late-stage cancer patients. In one Johns Hopkins study, a single high dose of psilocybin reliably triggered, in the majority of patients, a “mystical-type experience” ranked “as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.” (from “The Trip Treatment”, by Michael Pollan.) ...

In September of 2017 I raced my first ever mountain bike race - the Vapor Trail 125, the hardest race I could find up in the mountains of Colorado. After four years of 100 mile running races I was well and truly burned out on the idea of spending my summer training for yet another huge odyssey-on-foot… but I still wanted to get up into the high country, and I know by now that my best source of motivation is the fear of a big race on the calendar. ...

On June 8th I completed the Texas Water Safari, a 260 mile canoe race down in Texas that runs rivers from San Marcos to the Gulf of Mexico. My 4-man boat (filled by Jason Antin, Andrew Soles and Andrew Stephens) finished early Monday morning after 44 hours and 14 minutes of nonstop paddling. It was a glorious junkshow, vivid in all the ways a Safari can be; a wonderful reunion with Soles and Stephens; a smashing introduction to paddling for Jason Antin, who’d trained for less than two hours over two sessions. ...

In 2016, as part of my years-long quest to make it into the Hardrock 100, I signed up to race the IMTUF 100. IMTUF stands for “Idaho Mountain Trail Ultra Festival”, and I’ll admit that before the event, I found it difficult to tell people about the “I’m Tough” without apologizing for how lame it sounded and expanding the acronym. I’ve got no such issue now! This was the most beautiful trail race I’ve ever completed, absolutely world class in the scenery, the trails, and the overall quality of the event. ...

Earlier this month I attempted to complete the biggest endurance adventure of my life: the Rainier Infinity Loop, a project dreamed up by the late Chad Kellogg. The line physically traces out a rather sloppy infinity sign by traveling over Mount Rainier, the most glaciated peak in the lower 48, 28 miles clockwise around its base on the Wonderland trail back to the start, over the mountain again and then counter-clockwise on the remaining 65 miles of the Wonderland trail. Knock all that out and you’ll have traveled over 130 miles and climbed around 47,000 vertical feet. ...

I write software for fun and profit, and writing great software - like all creative work - requires long stretches of deep thought. I don’t know where creative insights come from, but two things are clear to me about how to find them: You can study and obsess over a problem as much as you want, but eventually you have to learn to sit and wait for your subconscious to bake all that work into something coherent. Sitting and waiting for those insights is excruciating. I started meditating a couple of years ago as a way to train myself to wait. Sit on a pillow, close your eyes, focus on your breath. If you haven’t ever done this, you should download Headspace, take 15 minutes and try it right now. You might think that it’s going to be relaxing. Instead you’ll discover that you, like me, have been living your entire life with a jabbering little monkey that’s terrified of boredom and specializes in drowning out those creative whispers from down deep. ...

I want to expand on the last piece I wrote on courage and goals, and talk about some of the traps that endurance racing can set for athletes looking to push their limits. That piece makes the case that aggressive goals are important because they force your ego to adapt, and that maintaining a flexible identity requires you to get good at setting goals. Goal-setting is hard, and an endurance race’s finish line is as good a goal as any to start with. ...

This post is about courage and failure, and how to think about success or failure when the objective is difficult. Aaron Steele’s 2014 Leadville 100 race report is one of the more honest and inspiring race reports I’ve read. Leadville is a brutal, high altitude 100 mile running race in Colorado. The race was Aaron’s first ultra-marathon DNF, or "Did Not Finish", out of dozens of ultras. You can tell from the post that the experience scared him: ...