Writing

Tim Ferriss’s interview of Seth Godin was stunning. It made me feel the way I did at my first TED conference, at 16 in Monterey - "Why didn’t anyone tell me that it was okay to think this way?" Seth thinks about the world, his mission and his choices with a clarity that was startling. I fired up this podcast during a long walk to the Alpine Modern cafe in Boulder, expecting Tim’s usual mildly interesting breakdown of his guest’s habits. The interview starts a little mechanically, but Seth takes over after about twenty minutes and those wide-eyed, holy-fuck "where is my PEN" moments start flowing. ...

It’s over! My first 100k is in the bag. I finished the 2015 Miwok 100k in 10 hrs and 12 minutes, good enough for 9th overall and 2nd place in my age group to a 23 year old crusher who took the overall win. The pace was much faster than the previous ultras I’ve done, all hundred milers. I spent this winter doing a bunch of ski mountaineering races, trudging up ski resorts and whipping my skinny skis down double black diamonds I had no business skiing on what’s basically my first season. All of those winter miles paid off with a huge boost in pace. Here’s the story. (And here’s the Strava if you want to skip the narrative.) ...

I’ve just merged a Cascalog pull request of mine that gives Cascalog operations access to the statistics that Cascading generates at the end of each job. I’ve also added global inc! and inc-by! functions that let you increment custom Hadoop counters from within your functions and operations without having to deal with all that prepfn nastiness we introduced in Cascalog 2.0. Here’s a link to the code. If you want to follow along, or just want to get the hell away from this blog and start playing with the code now, get yourself a copy of the new snapshot: ...

This is my race report from the 2015 Jackson Hole skimo race, the second of two ski mountaineering races I completed this weekend. (Here’s my report from yesterday’s race at Grand Targhee.) Jackson was going to be bigger and badder than Targhee, no question. I knew that I’d be hucking double black diamond chutes on Wade’s skinny race skis, but with no concept of how hard or dangerous that would be, I chose to shut down the usual mental preparation. I’d deal with the steeps soon enough. ...

Wow, I haven’t gotten crushed that hard in a race in a long time. Just fully WHIPPED! Jenna and I drove out to Jackson yesterday for the "Wyoming Rando Roundup", my first real weekend of racing since I signed up for all of these races a few weeks ago. I don’t have my own race setup yet, so Wade lent me his crazy carbon Alien 1.0 boots and SkiTrab skis, and some extremely short kicker skins (for flat stretches) that had showed up in the mail the day before I grabbed them. ...

This post is about some of the books related to endurance training and sports that have inspired me over the last couple of years. Training for endurance events changes you. At the beginning of a season, on my first long run, ten minutes in I feel anxiety creep in. How long have I been running? How many miles? How long until I get to turn around? Eventually these thoughts quiet down. The engagement of the activity is enough to keep me occupied for hours and hours. Dan Hammer thinks of engagement as cathexis - in the mountains, your thoughts focus in on the present and all distraction burns away cleanly. ...

Cascalog 2.0 has been out for over a year now, and outside of a post to the mailing list and a talk at Clojure/Conj 2013 (slides here), I’ve never written up the startingly long list of new features brought by that release. So shameful. This post fixes that. 2.0 was a big deal. Anonymous functions make it easy to reuse your existing, non Cascalog code. The interop story with vanilla Clojure is much better, which is huge for testing. Finally, users can access the JobConf, Cascading’s counters and other Cascading guts during operations. ...

A little side note before I get started - pivoting from my last post on ski mountaineering racing to this post on advanced Cascalog patterns has made me realize that I’m a full-fledged connoisseur of the esoteric. I’m embracing it! This is the first in a series of posts on hardcore Cascalog. If you’re stoked, leave me a comment telling me what you want to learn more about and we’ll go from there. ...

Oh my god, I can’t believe that this race is over! I’m sitting in my desk chair with a little blanket over me, knees wrecked, feeling like FDR. 26 hours and 15 minutes of mountain running, and a Strava page to prove it! Here are some pictures and tweets from the crazy day. Pre-Race Unlike Leadville, Wasatch requires an application. It’s one of the big, bad, fucked up hard races, with 25k feet of elevation gain to Leadville’s measly 15k. It’s got a reputation of being second to Hardrock in difficulty. ...

(Jason Antin cranking up A Basin in our second Skimo race of the year. Photo by Camera Photography.) My running season ended in September with the Wasatch Front 100, and I resigned myself to a winter of weight lifting and sporadic winter trail running. It takes a LOT of motivation to run around in the cold in deep snow, so I tend to hibernate athletically until March. After a week implementing this, our herding dog Pretzel’s bottled up energy was red-lining - watching him yip, vibrate, whimper and drag his leash around in that sad and hopeful way, Jenna and I gave in and committed to a winter outdoors. ...