Thinking On Your Feet

Early July is a special time in the woods of Eastern Pennsylvania. During the winter and into the spring, should you go scampering along most any trail, you’ll notice an abundance of thorns - fun little guys whose heads I imagine to be filled with dreams of being transplanted along the route of Hyner or Black Forest and making a runner cry some time after

The year: 2009.  The place: Hot Topic.  The person: Me. I gazed in reverent silence at the decidedly irreverent graphics adorning tees in a variety of colors: black, darker black, and maybe–there’s-a-tinge-of-gray-if-I-squint-my-eyes. Metal studded belts and bracelets, slogans extolling activities which would have gotten me grounded through eternity should I participate, and a healthy dose of posters with more skulls than a graveyard. It looked like the devil

Many of the feats which trail and ultra runners attempt are so extraordinarily difficult that most people, when told about them, will either doubt the runner's sanity, question their seriousness, or both. Only through sheer, blind belief can we conquer the impossible. It requires a great deal of imagination to generate this belief, to visualize ourselves at mile 30, mile 50, mile 80. Imagination plays

Ancient Chinese painting is known for its sharp contrast to the typical Western style. In Western art, it is customary to center the subject, to indicate their authority and power by giving them a gravity which the eye can’t ignore. Filling the frame, frozen in some bombastic pose, perhaps, in a moment of triumph, or bundled in agony and grief. Their emotion and their actions

There’s a monster on my heels.  I recently spent a month volunteering at a spiritual retreat center in the lower Catskills. Shrouded in solitude, I was looking forward to devoting all my energy to the pursuits which truly matter to me. During this time, I did hard workouts twice a week in preparation for the 50K I’ll be running in June. These workouts were targeted to

When the gun goes off, the stopwatch starts. When the finish line is crossed, the stopwatch stops. And when the stopwatch stops, we know who is the best. But do we really? Does that single number truly tell the whole story? Is something lost in using time as a singular reference point for performance?  Time as we know it - splicing up a day into so

I’d already made use of a downed tree to ford a flooded section of trail, then gotten mauled by a set of 6x2 minute hill repeats. It was the first time I had ever sandwiched a workout inside of a steadier effort rather than just the typical warmup and cool down format. On top of that, this was Sunday - long run day - and

The new year, and winter more broadly, is a season for rest, reflection, and rejuvenation. Time slips by quietly, and so turning the calendar provides a tangible milestone for its passage. Such a milestone accentuates the changes that have taken place over the course of one, five, or ten years, and sometimes, more painfully, the ones that have not. Perhaps the lurking ghost of a

In recent weeks, I have been on two runs which, I suspect, having stood the test of time, will prove their indelibility. During one, I trotted along the local rail trail - clear, flat, wide, but still cocooned in trees with animals scurrying here and there - before plunging into a wooded section of singletrack trail whose curves followed those of the creek nearby. It

You’re at a holiday party, work, the grocery store, the DMV. You’re chatting with someone and they look at you as if you’ve just sprouted neon purple antennae. Their eyes pop with a mixture of fascination, disbelief, and a dash of concern. Your shy smile, your shrug, are already prepped for their next breathless statement. And there it is. They open their mouth and the