Getting Ready to Burn that River!

The Burning River 100 starts dark and early (4:00 a.m.) Saturday morning. And I’m ready to get my body on the trails. Do I feel like I’m optimally trained for it? Depends. It’s been three years since I last ran a 100+ mile race – the Veterans Memorial 150 in 2018 – but it doesn’t …

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Maniac on Singletrack

I HAVE THREE TAKEAWAYS from last weekend’s Singletrack Maniac 50K: Never assume a water jug is full You never really know what you’re capable of until you do it Ultrarunners are the best f**king people on the planet. (I knew that already, so this race was just another confirmation.) There’s the TL;DR version. For those …

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Grandmaster of Disaster

After running the Grandmaster 100K last month in the Arizona desert, I now share one characteristic with legendary ultrarunner Jim Walmsley, who has now twice set the course record at the Western States 100. No, I did not win Western States. I haven’t even tried to qualify for it (yet). But we do indeed share …

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The Long and the Short of Running

A couple Januarys ago I had breakfast with my running coach, going over my planned race schedule. It would follow a pattern I’d established, of a target race in late May or June (100-miler or more), with shorter ultras in the spring to leapfrog up to it. So we mapped out a 50K and a …

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