sports

I feel like I’m never going to publish this damned thing… so here it is, in bullet point form. Maybe I’ll tidy it up some day. Niwot’s Challenge, a very fun race out in South Platte. Jason invited me to this damned thing last week… Text from Jason: “Free Sat?” All I could find was this one race report from Erik Sanders: https://gearjunkie.com/colorado-ultra-mountain-race-niwots-challenge Prep for the Infinity Loop later this summer. Race details, what does it entail… I’m totally detached from how hard it might be. “It’s only 45 miles”, says Jenna. ...

Well, I can honestly say, now, close to a year after the event, that I don’t remember this event in the furious detail that characterizes my usual race reports. How lucky! We’re not supposed to talk about the Niwot’s Challenge at all. I ran this race in 2019 for the second time, finishing in 27 hours and 17 minutes with Matt Fackrell and Jason Antin, my long-time collaborator on such beauties as “The Rainier Infinity Loop!” and the quite absurd “Tahoe 200, 2018 edition”. We ran a good portion of the race with Todd Salzer; Todd guided us through the first two loops, but unfortunately didn’t finish the 2019 edition. I know he’ll be back in 2020, this year. ...

Welcome back to my report of the 2018 Tahoe 200. If you haven’t read Part 1 and care about background and context, go check it out and come on back. Otherwise enjoy the tale! Table of Contents Heavenly Aid Station (102) Heavenly (102) to Armstrong (117) Armstrong (117) to Housewife Hill (135) Housewife Hill (135) to Sierra at Tahoe (142) Sierra at Tahoe (142) to Wright’s Lake (161) Wright’s Lake (161) to Tell Creek (175) Tell Creek (175) to Loon Lake (182) Loon Lake (182) to Barker Pass (199) Barker Pass (199) to Finish (205) Conclusion Heavenly Aid Station (102) We slept for about two hours at Heavenly. I woke up drenched in sweat; Jason claims that I spoke to him in the night, but I remember nothing. Jason couldn’t fall asleep at all, and finally woke me up at the two hour mark to get our stuff together and head out. ...

I never suspected that 100 mile races would be a gateway drug for… 200 mile races, but here I am, polishing off my race report for the Tahoe 200. What went wrong in my past? Neglectful parents? A broken home? The answers lie buried somewhere in the following account. First, the glorious Strava art I spent over 90 hours painting across the California landscape: And then my detailed account. Table of Contents Why? Pre-race in Tahoe Start to Stephen Jones (10.4) Stephen Jones (10.4) to Tahoe City (30) Tahoe City (30) to Brockway (50) Brockway (50) to Tunnel Creek (65) Tunnel Creek (65) to Spooner (82) Spooner (82) to Heavenly (102) Why? I’m going to describe why I ran the Tahoe 200, and the reasoning is going to sound unhinged. Ready? ...

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. ...