My mom’s been super committed to a walking regimen and I’m super proud of her. The other day she told me her iPod seemed to heal itself and instead of just playing the same few songs the shuffle was actually working correctly and she kept hearing songs she hadn’t in ages. One of these rediscovered […]
There will be no day 8. This was the end of the Blue Ridge Series, the inaugural event for the Road To 50 Races. We all looked a bit haggard… though there weren’t many of us left on this final day. I suppose there’s just no pleasing some people. Yesterday the rain soaked me through […]
By mile 10, I was more prune than man, the steady drenching rain soaking me through and through. By the teens, I wondered if my prune hands would make my fingerprints more or less identifiable. I decided since I couldn’t recall that being a plot point on CSI it probably didn’t matter. By mile 20, […]
The odds were not in my favor. Wait – The Hunger Games involves a fictionalmockingjay, not a mockingbird, right? Then how about “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird?” To be fair, I didn’t kill this mockingbird – it nearly killed me. The humidity was rough from the start, although it never quite got around […]
As of late this morning, I’m over halfway through the series… and boy are my legs tired. At the start line briefing, a drizzle came down. It would get much worse as the race wore on. During the pre-race announcements, George told us the Bee Rock Tunnel is the world’s shortest railroad tunnel. A quick […]
Kate and George strongly advised us yesterday to scope out the race start for Swamp Branch the night before. I shrugged it off, relying on the GPS map coordinates and figuring it’d all be fine. Turns out, it was not fine. Kate and George also warned us that at night, winding our way through the […]
Dateline: Huntington, WV. I’ve been here before, having run the Marshall University Marathon in 2011. I vaguely recalled bits and pieces of the town itself… and George said part of that marathon course was in this 12 loop course. But I don’t recall running by the babbling brooks. It was a long time ago… and […]
George and Kate Rose are old hands at multiday events. George was a participant of Mainly Marathons first Dust Bowl series and later wrote a book chronicling the madness. He and Kate were eventually corralled into administrative roles with them for the next 6 years or so. And today was their first race run under […]
With stops due to traffic snarls and or food and fuel, it was a 14 hour marathon drive today, a bit longer than GoogleMaps said at 4:30 this morning. The highway hypnosis inherent in driving at speed on stretches of a road vanishing in the distance is compounded by the shifting sands of time, a […]
This was me today. It was hot and humid and I just wasn’t hydrated or hydrating correctly. You’d think after all these years and all these miles that I’d know better. The course was a rail to trail out and back — 13.1 miles up, and 13.1 miles back down… and mostly flat as a […]