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THE ROAD

"Montoya could forgive anything of a bull fighter who had aficion, he could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me and all my friends. Without ever saying anything they were simply a little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bullfighting." -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises The road is at once all things; a place to sharpen and tone our instinct, to test our will, and in the end to guide us home along its course however winding or direct. Sometimes what happens on the road makes us better and helps us to understand more fully the macro and not the micro of every day life and the training and the living we do in between. Yesterday I was tested and I fell, I won't say that I failed because I learned something.  So on Sunday today when the run was a little harder and I was a little more sore and a little les...
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Searching for the gilded lining

The trajectory for running ultras seems to follow two different paths, the fork in the road seems to come after the first real ultra running season. After putting 2016 in the books at JFK, I took some serious time off, slept in, got sick, and now with some time(and pounds) under my belt I'm ready to commit for '17. Just a quick recap... Franklin Mountain Trail Run TROT Franklin Mountain... dude, these Texas mountains are not a joke, no games here, this is the territory that went unsettled for a reason. Jeremiah Johnson is spending no time in the Franklin Mountains!! Race day was cold and windy, when I say windy I don't mean a slight breeze out of the west I mean sustained with some serious gusts, enough to blow people off the side of the mountain and do some serious aid station removal. After surviving, a key word here, the first two or three miles we finally got some reprieve from the wind thanks to mother mountain, of course it would rear its ugly head again o...
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Swimming....

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In the weeks following my first 100 miler I've run through the normal post ultra hangover problems: Weird sleep patterns, temporary bi-polar disorder, sore bones, and some mild(very mild) depression like feelings. Knowing that this was coming is all part of the deal, the pact you have to make with your wife, kids, cat, dog, bearded lizard or whomever your malcontent is likely to affect. It's time to make amends and apologize because the time nigh for clearing the schedule for 2017 racing season! "The fish don't ask what the water is, they just swim." -Hondo Crouch Ultra running reminds me of a lot characters real, fictitious, and possibly hallucinated, today I'm thinking about Hondo. Hondo Crouch was a famous character around the hill country of Texas but his notoriety rose to a crescendo following the release of the song Luckenbach, Texas alternatively delivered by Waylon and Willie and most of the other bastions of Texas' strong outlaw country...
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Tahoe Rim Trail Race Report 2016

This is my first blog, I read plenty of them so this should be a exercise in subtle plagiarism right? I am not David Foster Wallace by any stretch of the imagination, but if you think I am, feel free to get in touch with me and sign me to a big literary deal and pay me a large advance. PS: I'm going to end sentences with prepositions, deal with it! Tahoe, first off one of the most incredible places I have ever been, the views, the people, the mountains, the personality of the whole place beams with adventure. It's adventure in its most elemental form. We flew into Reno from San Diego after being there for a week(Altitude training philosophy: train low, race high, check the results...) Geographically, Lubbock is very similar to Reno, San Diego, Tahoe ect.... in that it is on planet Earth, this is where the similarity ends. The Sierras loomed in the west like sentinels, guarding the richness beyond their peaks. It was amazing and unlike anything I had witnessed before, it w...
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