It turns out I and an Otter Pop are my worst enemies. Also the merging of half marathoners and marathoners at mile 24. But I get ahead of myself… The Long Beach Marathon moved up its start time to 5:30 out of high temperature fears. They proved to be unfounded… as did the 5:30 start […]

It’s brutally hot here in California at the moment. A heat dome or heat furnace or maybe just a descent into a level of Hell usually reserved for the Texas panhandle. But it’s been topping 100 for the last few days and into next week. Still, I had signed up for a race out in […]

How it started: How it ended: This was my third time running this event… albeit there was one other time I was supposed to run it but I may or may not have broken a toe and thus did not start (DNS). I was slower than I was in 2016 but not by much. And […]

Egads, has it really been so long? Have I really not toed the start line in almost 3 months? Part of that time off was a torn/wonky hamstring that I finally couldn’t ignore… although it’s still not “healed.” Part of that time off was a general sense of ennui. I used to travel a lot […]

I ran San Diego once before. It was in 2007 as part of the then nascent series of Rock N Roll events.  When I did it way back when, I had yet to run a sub-4 race.  So it was nice to come back and run this modified course (I swear in 2007 we ran […]

For funsies… and for watermarked seasideness…

I’ve run with these organizers before, running along the PCH just outside Ventura . They typically use the same route, albeit they’ve recently modified it, mercifully removing a section that had us climbing an overpass incline and changing a two loop course to a three times out-and-back event. I had hoped a flattened run would […]

Seventy-four minutes. That’s how long it took to get out of the parking lot after the race. With gridlock straight out of Jacques Tati’s Trafic, or in that opening montage scene in LA Story, cars from every direction were jockeying for position in the lanes that supposedly lead out of the lots. Surprisingly few honking […]

I couldn’t sleep. Part of it is this head cold but even taking some serious drugs to help me breathe, I couldn’t fall asleep. This after a cramped red eye flight to Nashville with not a lot of sleep either. It had been probably three days since I slept. I had lost my voice, the […]

I’ve been to Nashville a few times as an adult. I’ve visited Cooter’s Museum devoted to the Dukes of Hazzard TV show. I’ve wandered round downtown, stood on the Grand Ol Opry Stage in its various iterations, and I’ve been to the Centennial Park’s 1897/1931 Parthenon recreation. And so as I stumbled about this self-proclaimed […]