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I’ve been working to get into the Hardrock 100 since 2013, and finally made it through the lottery this past December. The race starts on July 14th, this coming Friday! In three days, at 6am, I’ll jog out of Silverton, CO and begin a potentially 48 hour-long meditation on the phrase, “be careful what you wish for”. For anyone interested in following along, here are the relevant links: Runner tracking on OpenSplitTime My live-tracking splits and estimates Live race coverage by RunSteepGetHigh The course starts in Silverton and travels counter-clockwise through Lake City, Ouray and Telluride before aiming us back at Silverton, accumulating just over 33,000 feet of vertical gain along the way, all through terrain like this: ...

Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...

Memento Mori. In English, this Latin phrase means something like “remember that you must die”, or “Remember Death”. The Stoic philosophers were big pushers of this idea as the core insight of a daily meditation practice. Are you worried that there are things you’re going to regret about your life when you die? What if you died today? It is absolutely certain that you are going to die; you might as well sit down each morning and imagine it. Do any regrets flare up about your day, or your life? ...

I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets. I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music. ...