Welcome

If you find anything useful here, great—I'm glad I took the time to write it!

The more I write down, the less I have to remember. Additionally, the more I write down, the more I seem to remember.

Life

Greetings. I'm Cliff Matthews aka Lazy Young deadhead.

I'm alive. Or I've died, and nobody has updated this page.

I'm dumping some of my thoughts into this book. It's like I'm writing for a younger version of myself and equally pointless. I don't (yet!) have a time machine and the early model of Young Lazy Deadhead listened to no one.

Too Public a Life?

I'm Cliff Matthews (Team RWB, Strava), aka Clifford Matthews (UltraSignup, YouTube), aka deadhead (BARGE, devctm, Marathon Maniacs), aka ctm (GitHub, Albuquerque Game Developers Guild) aka nmdeadhead (Freesound, reddit, Hacker News).

Although I don't wear a tinfoil hat, I am concerned with privacy, albeit I'm more concerned with yours than mine.

I don't have a Facebook¹ (although not yet an Instagram) account. I also have a LinkedIn account, although I haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date.

Over the years, I've tossed various random stuff into public repositories in my GitHub account. In 2016 I chose to publicly document the training I was planning on doing for the 2017 Bataan Memorial Death March. It felt weird having so much info out there, but I did hear from others who read it and appreciated that I made it available, so this book continues that tradition. I'll slowly added more info that people may or may not find handy. It keeps me off the streets.

My Beliefs

I have a ton of beliefs and I'm sure many are wrong. I don't, however, deliberately choose to be contrarian or controversial, much less choose to be deliberately wrong. I have more confidence in some of my beliefs than others.

I believe in unarticulated knowledge as well as misarticulated knowledge. The former is roughly that there are things that work, but aren't explained, the latter is there are things that work that are explained incorrectly. For example, one can compute the length of a hypotenuse of a right triangle by taking the square root of the sum of the squares of each of the two other sides. This works even if I misexplain the Pythagorean theorem.

Multiple Universes

After describing some ridiculous thing I did in my youth (and remember, I'm still young, so it could have been yesterday) I often say that I believe in multiple universes and in most of them I'm dead and my mom is sad. I then add that in a few, I'm dead and my mother is ecstatic. Am I being serious when I say that? No. In this universe, it's more a tangential commentary on expected value. In other universes I'm dead serious.

Soy

FWIW, having this page in my "Life" section makes it sound like soy is an important part of my life, which is an overstatement, but putting it under "Running" would be too specific.

I believe the amount of soy, of the type I eat, is good for me. I don't have man boobs, and although I'm not muscular, per-se, I do very well in the Bataan Memorial Death March heavy division do OK in the Mount Taylor Winter Quadrathlon. Both of those require a fair amount of leg and core strength.

I haven't had my testosterone measured, but I'd be very surprised to find that it's low. Someday, when I'm flush with cash, I'll get it checked.

I've been eating soy long before this article came out, bit it appears to be a worthwhile summary.

Pretty much everything I've eaten starting March 31st, 2018 is online, so you can see for yourself how much and what types of soy I eat, but it's basically 2 cups of soy milk a day in my two servings of fortified oatmeal, with occasional tofu, tempeh and edamame. In general, I don't eat "junk" food with soy isolates or fake meat made with soy.

Running

I run a lot. I'm also the race director for the Albuquerque Fat Ass Series.

The Albuquerque Fat Ass Series is hosted (for free, thanks!) on wordpress.com and as such it can't host the GPX files that participants might want, so I host them here.

On Thursday, August 12th, 2021 I gave, to the Albuquerque Road Runners, a brief presentation on my Hardrock 2021 experience. I had planned on writing up the notes in this book and then using them to guide my presentation, but instead I just had a few beers and talked everyone's ears off. So, I'll have to get into Hardrock again so I can do it right next time.

In my early ultra running years I benefited greatly from various blogs, including, but by no means limited to, Studies in Clydeology, The Athena Diaries, Club Dread, and the Pink Corker's. Often these blog writers had done events that I was contemplating entering and their insights helped prepare me.

However, I'm always doing something and if I had to write a good blog entry for a race, I'd never finish (because I'm a bad writer, a procrastinator and someone whose memory won't remember details when I want to write them down and whose impatience won't write memories down when I still have them). So, instead of a blog, I'm writing this book. I'm using GitHub so that I can change things over time, but not in a sneaky way to pretend I didn't say something that later turns out embarrassing, but to allow me to eventually cut dross.

Resources

Exceedingly little of what I do is anything I have thought up myself. At best, some of the things I do are a synthesis of what others do, kind of like my fortified oatmeal being a mixture of food that I think is good for me that tastes great when mixed together.

Over the years I've read many books, blog posts, and web articles as well as simply asked questions of people with much more experience than I. I didn't, however, take notes on what I've read or what people have answered, so this Resources section is going to be my usual hodge-podge of stuff that I think of when I'm spending a few minutes jotting things down.

Couch to 5k

The Couch to 5k program is worth mentioning even though I never did it. However, the people who started the BARGE Fun Run did and that's what inspired them. The BARGE Fun Run inspired me. After seeing me finish my first marathon, my brother-in-law thought "If Cliff can do it, how hard can it be?" and decided to run a marathon as well. He, however, on my advice, did use the Couch to 5k program. Not only did he finish the 2010 Chicago Marathon, but he's gone on and done a variety of ultras, including the Leadville Trail 100. So, Couch to 5k is pretty worthwhile.

Books

This list is currently alphabetically ordered and contains no reviews. Eventually, I might explain what I think I got out of each book, but for now this is a super quick, nowhere near exhaustive, brain dump. Although I've used my bookshelf to remind me of the various books I've read, I have a habit of giving books away (want a book? just ask), so I'm sure some have slipped through the cracks.

• Prescriptive
  • Born to Run 2
  • Eat & Run
  • Eat Move Sleep
  • Exercised
  • Finding Ultra
  • Racing Weight
  • Relentless Forward Progress
  • Running with Lydiard
  • Running to the Top
  • Training Essentials
  • Waterlogged
• Biographical and Autobiographical
  • Born to Run
  • Corbitt: The Story of Ted Corbitt
  • The Miler
  • Out There
  • Out and Back
  • Presto!
  • Reborn on the Run
  • Running on Empty
  • Running with Sherman
  • Tales from Out There: The Barkley Marathons
• Tangential
  • Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story¹
  • The Rise of Superman

Music

I like listening to music as I run. The vast majority of the time I simply listen to songs at random from my iPod's large library. I get the runner's high fairly easily and when that's kicked in, the music and lyrics pull me in different directions. The randomness is like a washing machine for my mind.

I do, however, have several playlists, and I've included approximations of my three different "speed" (high cadence, motivating) ones here. I use Speed 3 when I'm doing interval training, Speed 9 when I'm running as quickly as I can for a distance anywhere from six miles to thirteen and a half and my Bataan Memorial Death March (BMDM) playlist when I'm doing my Saturday BMDM training or when I'm racing a marathon trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon or otherwise do well for my age.

Although not as fast as Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, I also run fairly quickly to Professor Longhair and the faster tunes of Klezmatics.

My favorite runner's song, however, is Runner's High by the pillows.

Special mention of The Impression That I Get, because I'm sure it isn't good.

Other GPX Files

Wordpress free hosting is an excellent service, but they don't allow GPX files to be downloaded directly. There are other excellent free sites, like trailrunproject.com that host GPX files, but require you to create a (free) account and log-in to download them.

Most people are OK with using free accounts and the tracking that comes with them to get useful information, but some aren't. As such, not only do I provide GPX files for the races I direct, I will also add GPX files for other events so that people who wish not to be tracked can download them.

Foothills 50k

This page complements the official Foothills 50k page by providing the GPX file (that can't be served from wordpress.com).

The same file is available, with more information, via the Foothills 50k page hosted on alltrails.com. If you're so inclined create an account and download it from there.

On the other hand, since you're here, feel free to

• Download the GPX File

White Mesa Fat Ass 50k

This page complements the official White Mesa Fat Ass 50k page by providing the GPX file (that can't be served from wordpress.com).

If you are a member of Strava, you can see this run in Strava and download it from there.

On the other hand, since you're here, feel free to

• Download the GPX File

Events I Direct

I am a reluctant, exceedingly minimalist (lazy is my middle name), race director. I may get better as time goes on or I may shed my RD duties. I don't want to be a race director, per-se, but I don't want the Baldy 50k, or any of the Albuquerque Fat Ass races, to go away as long as there is still interest in them.

Foothills Fat Ass

This page complements the official Foothills Fat Ass page by providing four useful GPX files and a few tables.

The event starts at the Michael Emery Trailhead Parking lot and, depending on the distance one chooses, consists of one, two or three out-and-backs, known as the 10k, the 50k southern section and the 50k northern section, all three of which are done by the 50k participants. Here are the GPX files for each:

• Foothills Fat Ass 2024 10k
• Foothills Fat Ass 2024 50k Northern Section
• Foothills Fat Ass 2024 50k Southern Section

The entire 50k course (all three out-and-backs) is available as

• Foothills Fat Ass 2024 50k

AllTrails

These four routes can be seen in my AllTrails Maps collection, even without an AllTrails account, although you'll need an AllTrails account to download from their site.

Distance Descriptions

5k

Head half-way (i.e., 1.55 miles) up the 10k route, turn around, come back.

10k

Head up the 10k route, return.

Half Marathon

Do the 10k route, then head down the 50k Southern Section to the Menaul Parking Lot, return.

This route includes 2.6 miles of asphalt, which is kind of a lot for a half marathon, but it's there to encourage you to do the marathon or 50k next year. There's no guarantee there will even be a next year, much less that we'll have the same course, but that stretch of asphalt has been with us since the beginning (2012), I think.

Marathon

Do the 10k and the Southern Section, then run a total of four miles that brings you back to the Finish (e.g., run two miles out and then two miles back).

This route includes 2.6 miles of asphalt, which is an unavoidable tax. If you want to pay less than a 10% asphalt tax, step up to the 50k next (or this!) year.

Alternate—Less Social—Marathon

Do only the Southern Section and Northern Sections (i.e., skip the 10k), but do them in entirety. The downside is that you don't get to run with all the other runners who start with the same 10k out-and-back. On the other hand, you get to do the southern loop at the end of the Southern Section (you get to run almost to I-40).

50k

This route includes 2.6 miles of unavoidable asphalt, but it's still much better than 2023, when we had something like twelve miles of asphalt.

Do the 10k, the Southern Section and then the Northern Section. The Northern Section is basically Trail 365, although there's a minor short-cut in the south that prevents a little backtracking and another minor short-cut that takes you into the Wilderness area as you get close to the tram. If you choose to though, you can take Trail 365 the entire way and it won't add much more than a mile or two.

Chimney Melon 50k

This page complements the official Chimney Melon 50k page by providing the best GPX file of the course. I don't have a perfect one.

This one is marred slightly by me going off course a little bit in the beginning between the parking lot at the base of the Tram and where the path of the Tramway Trail is straightforward and strictly ascending. If I remember correctly, if you follow these tracks exactly and backtrack where I made the mistake, it'll add less than a hundred yards, so you don't have to fear that these tracks will greatly mislead you.

I made these tracks on September 3rd, 2022, doing the course on my own, for fun.

My activity is on Strava, but you're not allowed to download the GPX if you don't have an account, so here it is: GPX file

Mt. Baldy 50k

This page complements the official Mt. Baldy 50k page by providing the GPX files (that I can't serve from wordpress.com) from previous runnings of the Baldy 50k.

I've run Baldy 50k several times, but so far, I've only uploaded three of them to Strava.

As far as I can tell from reviewing my paths on Strava, none of those three have any significant wrong turns. The ones from 2019 and 2020 have ridiculous elevation profiles though. They were made with an ancient Ambit 3 that just does a horrible job with elevation.

To see my activity on Strava, click on the year. To download the GPX file, click on the words "GPX File".

• 2013 Download: GPX File
• 2019 Download: GPX File
• 2020 Download: GPX File

Results

2022

Baldy 50k

These results are now webscorer.

However, I placed them here before I put them there, so I'm leaving them here as well. Normally people have to finish by 9pm for it to count, but that rule was relaxed this year due to the excessive blowdown.

George and I slowed down significantly on the way out to Johnson Lake as we did some trail maintenance. We employed all sorts of tricks (with no injuries in this universe) to improve things: primarily moving, breaking, bending and kicking. However, there was still more blowdown that we couldn't improve than the amount we did improve. So, I doubt anyone who came after us would even notice our handiwork.

The weather was very nice. No thunder or lightning or even rain. It was mostly overcast. My truck claims it was 42F at about 7:30am and 51F at 8:20pm.

White Mesa 50k

Events I've Participated In

Over the years I've participated in more than a couple of hundred events. I often take notes to myself before and afterward; I've even written the occasional event report and mailed it to a few friends. Unless asked, I don't plan on digging up any of that old information, but I will take a stab at documenting my experiences here.

So, now I'm trying to write up "brief" (yeah, right) summaries of the various events I participate in as a way to (very slightly) eventually give back to the community. I really wanted to do this after Hardrock in preparation for my ARR presentation, but I did not allocate the time to do so and just gave a drunken rant instead.

Although these reports are for me, if you have a question about anything I've written here, send me email. Similarly, if you have a question about any of the events I've participated in that I haven't documented here, send me email. Most of my longer events are listed on my UltraSignup page. I'm also a member of Marathon Maniacs; which lists my marathon or longer events.

DNFs

UltraSignup doesn't always list the entrants who Did Not Finish (DNF). So, for completeness, these are, I believe, all the times I've started a race and not officially finished:

Eventually, I'll write up a race report for each of those, because I think DNFs are more noteworthy (and unique) than other race reports.

Cancellation Mid Race

In addition to the above, the Jemez Mountain Trail Run 50 miler was canceled due to a sudden storm while I and most others were out on the course in 2014. There were only 20 finishers that year. The storm caught everyone by surprise and even some of the aid station volunteers were going hypothermic. I believe a few entrants went to the hospital, but nobody died.

Did Not Start

Although I had a covid rollover entry to the 2021 Santa Fe Century, I chose not to start. Initially, I had planned to, but it was during Balloon Fiesta and the day after the AA50k. Between my Balloon Fiesta drinking and my AA50k drinking, I was just not healthy enough to want to ride SFC in horrible weather.

Although I was registered for the 2023 Boston Marathon, my right foot was not in good enough shape for me to do the Tough Ruck the day before. Additionally, although I had planned on taking my family with me to Boston for an east-coast vacation, that plan changed when my daughter Iris was appointed to the United States Military Academy. I'll be taking our family to her acceptance day ceremony in August, instead.

2021

In 2021 I:

• finally got all six ascents of Elevation Insanity¹ done in a calendar day
• finished Hardrock (it was my first attempt)
• set a course record at the Tortugas Mountain 24-hour challenge in the drinking division
• took first in my Age Group in the Big Cottonwood Marathon
• finished the Deadman Peaks 100 miler a week after finishing my tenth Javelina Jundred

Hardrock was my biggest accomplishment by far, but getting Elevation Insanity done before midnight had been eluding me for years. The drinking division of Tortugas Mountain required each participant to drink a (12 oz. minimum, 5% ABV minimum) beer before each four mile loop. I completed fourteen loops. The Deadman Peaks, Javelina Jundred pair is the first time I attempted to run two 100 milers on back-to-back weekends.

Due to covid, some of the events I normally participate in were canceled or otherwise altered in a way that prevented me from participating. The Sandia Snowshoe Race, Mt. Taylor Winter Quadrathlon, King of the Hill Ruck Run, Bataan Memorial Death March, Boston Marathon, Santa Fe Century, and Believe in Heroes Ruck Run are the ones I can think of.

I finished all the events I started, but I didn't start the Santa Fe Century, even though my registration had rolled over from the previous year. It had been rescheduled in October which made it inconvenient (and the weather was pretty bad that day).

The only event I had planned on doing in December was Perky Garcia's Grinch Lunch, but I had covid and stayed home.

These are the events I completed:

Hardrock 2021

This was the biggie, but I didn't take notes at the time. My excellent team comprised JE: crew chief, SB: JE's right hand man, PL: pacer from Grouse (mile 42.2) to Telluride (mile 72.8) and MW: pacer from Telluride to the finish line. They did all the work. I just had to hike, walk and run in a big circle with their assistance.

I will come back and fill this in sometime.

2022

I completed a lot of events in 2022, but I didn't start writing entries for this book until I ran the Big Cottonwood Marathon in September. So, the links in the Event column are my event reports when I've written them or to official times or Strava entries when I haven't.

My big race of 2022 was the Cocodona 250. I wound up doing it without a crew or pacer, so I "ran" it very conservatively. I was not particularly beaten up at the end, so in the following week I ran 85 miles and rode my bike another 70. Strava shows that I "ran" 740 miles in May of 2022 and just over 3,000 in all of 2022.

The majority of entries in this table are races, but in most cases I did not "race" them; I finished them at an enjoyable pace. The non-races I've included are mostly social training runs that I try to do every year.

Cedro Peak 50k

Fasted except for three beers.

My goal for Cedro 50k this year was simply to carry my Cocodona 250 pack and try for an average heart rate of 115 bpm. I wasn't sure that I could do that and still make the cut-offs, so I was prepared to rev my HR higher if necessary.

I was not planning on doing it fasted, but I ate like a piggy the afternoon and evening before and decided on race day morning that I had enough calories in me that I'd start out fasted and just eat when I felt like it and I never felt like it.

However, Eric P. (THANKS!) had a 12 oz. 6% ABV Santa Fe Adobe Igloo waiting for me at about mile 24.5, so I broke my fast and had that. Once my fast was broken it was pointless to resist begging for beer at Spencer B.'s aid station, where Brian Murray (DOUBLE THANKS) treated me to a 16 oz. 5.1% ABV Perle Haggard on my way out and another on my way back.

So, my entire calories before for race day before I reached the finish line were about 0 from the two large cups of Andrew A.'s (TRIPLE THANKS) pre-race coffee and about 600 from the beer.

Strava claims my average HR was 119, but I was using the Vertix 2's optical HR and there are a couple of places where it read anomalously high, so I'm guessing I did come close to my 115 goal.

With respect to C250, I believe I could easily have done another 18 miles and still felt fresh. I did trip and fall and hit the ground about a half dozen times (all but one of the before I started drinking beer). Luckily, I sustained no injuries.

My official time was 8:19:15, 42nd out of 53 finishers. In 2019, I ran it in 6:03:51 but I didn't have the Cocodona 250 coming up soon thereafter, and I had some non-alcohol calories.

Whee!

Cocodona 250

Overview

I finished in 111:55:01. It was epic, but I wasn't writing race reports back then.

A picture of me has been posted to Instagram (it's the second of three, so you have to click the right arrow to see it).

I do plan on retroactively writing a C250 2022 race report. Just before the start of C250 2023 I added some notes to my C250 2022 Strava Activities.

• Day One
• Day Two
• Day Three
• Day Four
• Day Five

Big Cottonwood Marathon 2022

Overview

I had run the Big Cottonwood Marathon twice prior: 2019 and 2021. Both times, I raced it so I could (and did!) qualify for the Boston Marathon. It is a very downhill course, although the rollers starting around mile 19 have slowed me down all three years.

This year, however, my truck died the day before and that complicated my race. Luckily, I'll be sixty years old by Boston 2023, so I only needed to run a 3:50 to qualify and I ran 3:25:32.

This report is for my own benefit. Although I remember the details clearly as I write this, it won't be too long before I forget many of the details. My plan is to switch from running the Big Cottonwood Marathon as a Boston Qualifier to running the Tucson marathon. My MSCS advisor has moved to Tucson and running that race would be a good excuse to visit him. Additionally, Aravaipa puts on a good event.

Thursday: Albuquerque to Moab

I left Albuquerque around the time I thought I'd need to leave in order to arrive at Moab Kitchen around 4pm, i.e., just as they were opening. I love Moab Kitchen and I also found a great campsite just north of there last year that I was looking forward to returning to.

I did indeed get there shortly after four. I ate some food, made a business call, caught up on my email and was about to drive to the Gemini Bridges Road campground when I remembered that the last time I had tried to use four-wheel drive I had trouble shifting it in and out. So, instead of waiting until I absolutely had to have 4WD, I decided to check it in the Moab Kitchen parking lot. Uh oh. Not only was it exceedingly hard for me to get it into 4-Low, I basically couldn't get it, unassisted, back into 2WD.

After texting some friends for advice, I tried rocking the truck back and forth, and finally I got it into 2WD. Dodged a bullet! Gemini Bridges was out, so I chose to go to Klondike Bluffs Road instead. My truck sounded a little funny as I was driving, but I was harried and there may have been grooves in the asphalt. I couldn't figure out if I was imagining things.

I set up my tent, read a bit of Presto!, then went to sleep.

Friday morning: Moab to Spanish Fork

I woke up at my normal time and kicked myself for not having joined AAA. My buddy Jason's truck's radiator catastrophically failed a couple weeks prior. He had to pay a huge bill to get his truck towed. At the time, I had mentioned that I keep meaning to sign up for AAA (my truck is a 1998 with more than 200,000 miles on it), but I always forget. So, although it would have been better to have signed up well before heading out from Albuquerque, I used my phone as a hot-spot and joined AAA.

The noise I thought I had heard while driving the previous night had disappeared, or perhaps it had never been there or maybe even I had gotten accustomed to it. Regardless, other than running way too low on gas and having to pay around $6/gallon to get a few gallons at a remote gas station, the drive went well until I my truck failed to drive when the stoplight I was at turned green.

I was in the left-most of three non-turning lanes on highway six in Spanish Fork. I put my hazards on, then tried putting the truck in neutral and pushing it out of the way. It moved a little before it stopped and couldn't be pushed. Not by me solo and not when three large men volunteered to help. The transmission was fried and nothing I did helped.

I tried to arrange a tow through AAA but their system didn't work well, so it literally took hours while I interacted with them. Eventually my truck was towed to Tunex in nearby Springville. The Tunex people were nice and understanding, but not only did they need to diagnose the problem, they also had to find a replacement transfer case and drive-train so they could get me a quote. It was not going to be cheap, nor would it be done soon.

Friday afternoon: Spanish Fork to packet pickup and the hotel

Luckily, I was able to find a car in Springville that I could rent for a day at Turo. Sometime around 5pm, I was able to jog over to the rental car, drive back to Tunex, grab a bunch of stuff from my truck (including my food; I had chosen to drive north in a fasted state, because I figured I'd eat in the packet pickup parking lot around noon), then drive to packet pickup which was going to close at 7pm.

There was at least one accident that caused the freeway to crawl to a halt. I think there were actually two. It was a bit nerve-racking both because I needed to get to packet pickup by 7, but I certainly didn't want to get into a fender bender.

I made it to packet pickup around 6pm and then got checked in to the Residence Inn around 7pm. I had not yet eaten that day. I had previously planned on what I would eat and when, but that all got thrown out the door when my truck died. I wound up eating about 3,000 calories of food (including the highish-fiber oatmeal that was supposed to be my post-race recovery food) in an hour or so and going to bed.

Race Day, pre-race

My alarm woke me up at 3:15 and I drank a double espresso. I think I had fallen asleep around 9:30, so almost six hours. Had the previous day not been so hectic, my guess is I'd have fallen asleep about an hour earlier (and had my final calories several hours before that).

I had a little food at the hotel before the hotel buses drove us to the start. I immediately headed to the porta-potties and kept walking all the way to the end of them and the last one was unused. Yay.

I put on my sweatpants and a sweatshirt and wrapped myself in the space blanket from packet pickup. I killed time by reading a book written by the daughter of a Bataan Death March survivor. Around 6:15 (I think), I drank a double espresso. Sometime around then I also ate some basmati rice and took two 200mg ibuprofen tablets.

Initially I had planned on only taking 200mg pre-race and 200mg at the halfway point, but I had forgotten to do laundry before getting ready to leave Albuquerque, so I didn't have a lot of clean socks. I did, however, have a clean pair of very thin socks. I also didn't have any low-mileage road shoes, so I chose the Torin pair with around 850 miles on them (as opposed to my other pair with over 1,400) and decided the combination of ancient shoes and thin socks merited additional analgesics.

Poor Porta-Potty Position

The very trick that allowed me to get an open porta-potty fresh off the bus worked against me this time. Thinking I had plenty of time, I got in the closest porta-potty line to where I had been sitting. That was the left-most line. When there is a row of N porta-potties and N is large enough (e.g., eight or more), people at the head of any given line then typically advance to the first of up to three porta-potties ahead of them, specifically the one directly in front of them and one to either side.

The upside of one person having the choice of three porta-potties is that it lessens the chance of a line being completely held up by someone taking a longer than usual time in a potty. It does, however, require each person at the head of the line paying attention to make sure that each line is still moving more-or-less fairly. The downside is that a line can stall if the person at the head of that line doesn't understand this de facto protocol, is distracted or simply doesn't want to take any stall except the one directly in front.

All else equal, the lines at either end of a row of porta-potties will move at two-thirds the speed of the interior lines, because the person at the head of the line will only have two porta-potties to choose from, while the person at the head of an interior line has three. I knew this, but still chose to stand in the left-most line, figuring that since I had plenty of time, two-thirds speed would get me in and out with room to spare. I was wrong.

The line I was in stalled. I think the person at the head of the line not only wasn't considering the diagonal stall as a possible choice, but he also wasn't noticing that people from the adjacent line were taking the stall in front of him repeatedly.

Drawstring Disaster

It had been cool enough that I had chosen to not take off my pre-run outer layer, so I still had my pre-race bag with me, and the drop off for that was back up the hill. I decided it was more important to pack my bag and get it dropped off and get back to the start line than attempt to take another poop.

Unfortunately, when I went to tie up my bag, the string broke. I asked the person shoveling bags into the truck if he had a spare bag, but he didn't and directed me further up the hill. I went all the way up and nope, nobody up there had spare bags either, but there were several people who also had broken strings.

I extracted the two pieces of string from the drawstring portion of the bag, tied them together and then asked a woman for assistance. She offered to tie my bag while I held it, but I politely asked her to hold the bag while I tied it so that if it came undone and I lost anything (and my phone and wallet were in the bag!), I'd only have myself to blame.

I then descended to the bag-drop truck and handed them my bag and found my place in line. With little fanfare, the race started at 6:45.

The Race itself

Waiting in line for the race to start I was a little concerned by the possibility of my bag either opening and disgorging some of its contents or losing the tie that had my bib number.

If the bag was intact, but without a bib number, would I be able to find it? Probably; they'd presumably set it aside and I could identify it, or perhaps they'd open it and find my wallet. Similarly, if my wallet or phone slipped out, I'd probably be able to reclaim them, too.

Before the race started I felt like I probably could poop if given the chance, but I didn't feel like I needed to.

Once I crossed the starting line, all my anxiety disappeared. The initial downhill grade is steep enough that it takes me a little effort and concentration to adjust my cadence and stride so I'm getting the "free downhill", not fighting it, but also not running out of control.

Before the race had begun, I was chatting with another runner and he mentioned that the aid stations would have gels. With that in mind, I lightened my expandable waistband by removing five of the seven gels I had, figuring I'd just take them from the aid station. I think that was the right thing to do, but it did mean that my gel consumption was less predictable, because not all aid stations. I would have known that had I researched it pre-race, since it was well documented on the Big Cottonwood Marathon website.

Bam!

About nineteen miles in, I knew I had to take a porta-potty break to poop. As I feared, eating as much as I did the prior evening caught up with me. I was in and out fairly quickly, but a bit distracted as I tried to tie my running short drawstring as I ran. I was still running a little to the right (i.e., where the porta-potties had been) of the road when I tripped and hit fairly hard.

My left knee took the brunt of the impact, but I also managed to scrape my right knee and bloody my right palm. I was able to get back up almost immediately and resume running. I had taken an additional 400mg of ibuprofen at mile 13 and by now it was kicking in, so I didn't have that much discomfort and didn't limp, per-se, but my gait was slightly affected.

Excuses, excuses

This year I was three minutes and sixteen seconds slower than last year, but my average heart rate was ten beats per minute slower. I think that had I been able to eat on the day before like I had planned and gotten to sleep when I planned, I wouldn't have needed the porta-potty. I also think that I slowed a little before I resigned myself to making that stop and I suspect that had I not made the porta-potty stop I wouldn't have fallen.

So, did my truck's death the day before prevent me from PR'ing? Maybe. On the other hand, it took me 1:29:50 to get to mile 12 this year and only 1:28:08 to get there the year before. Mile 12 was long before I took the porta-potty break, so presumably I wasn't slowed as much by GI distress and definitely wasn't slowed by the fall (that hadn't yet occurred) in my first 12 miles. On the other hand, last year my heart-rate was around 150bpm at mile 12, but only around 135bpn at mile 12. My average HR was still around 150bpm on my 24th mile last year, but had only crept up to 140bpm by during my 24th mile this year. I believe my HR data suggests I was being held back a bit at the end, but I'll never know.

FWIW, had I finished fifteen seconds earlier, I'd have been 3rd in my age group. I'd need to take off an additional five minutes and seventeen seconds to have taken 2nd AG and another six seconds after that to have been first in my age group this year. No truck problems probably would have given me 3rd AG. I think 2nd or 1st AG would have been a coin-flip.

On the other hand, nobody my age or older finished before I did, which is what I call—tongue in cheek—beating the old people. Whee!

Aftermath

The injury to my left knee was minor, but sufficiently uncomfortable that I used ibuprofen for several days after the fall. I fell on September 10th and the last time I used ibuprofen for my knee was midnight between the 16th and 17th. The scab on my knee finally came off on October 13th, almost five weeks after the fall. Normally my scabs go away in two weeks.

Luckily, it was an injury to the outside of my knee and not anything internal to my knee itself. Although I didn't do a big hike a week after the Big Cottonwood Marathon due to being stuck in Utah, I did do the AA50k 13 days after and the Tour of the Rio Grande 15 days after.

I have added this aftermath section so that if I ever review this report, it'll remind me to not fall on asphalt, especially when accelerating in a road marathon. It could have been much worse.

AA 50k 2022

Overview

AA 50k is a night race (starting at 7pm on a Friday) that normally consists of up to ten 3.3 mile loops around Albuquerque Academy. It is open to people who wish to do fewer. Back when we had thirty or so people starting, after people had finished they'd be put in the division for the number of laps they had completed and then, within that division, ranked based on their finishing time.

It may be time to retire this race. We only had three starters: Jason Romero, Mark Werkmeister and myself. Jason and I finished 31 miles seconds less than eight hours.

The "Race"

Mark was planning on doing at most four laps (i.e., a half marathon), but complication from his recent surgery limited his participation to a little more than two laps (a bit more than a 10k). Furthermore, Mark has not yet been cleared to run, so he was walking, so Jason, Mark and I walked together initially.

About four tenths of a mile into his third loop, Mark let prudence turn him back toward his car so he could drive home. Although he had been cleared by his doctor to walk and hike, his body was acting up and telling him to stop. He listened.

Being lazy, Jason and I accompanied Mark back to his car before restarting our third loop. You might think that would have caused us to do an extra eight tenths of a mile, but instead we decided to do only nine complete laps, since with all the futzing around, we were at 31.03 miles by then.

Although we stuck together, my GPS watch said my time was 7:59:45, whereas Jason's said his time was 7:59:47, so I stole the win!

What was I doing?

I took this event for granted. I knew Mark was going to be there and was going to be walking a few loops. I also knew that earlier in the year I had run the Cedro Peak 50k in a fasted state until the final three aid stations, where I had a beer at each. So, I figured I could just show up, walk a few laps with Mark, not pay much attention to my caloric intake and then run the remaining laps after Mark was done and call it a night.

Turns out, Mark walks much faster than I do. He always has. He is taller that I am, but I suspect his natural stride is a greater percentage of his height than mine, so at what appeared to be the same cadence, it was hard for me to keep up without running, but my pride didn't want me to run. I did, however want to stay near him, in order to make chatting easier, so for the first lap and change I walked faster than was comfortable and found myself getting tired and hungry!

It was a bit demoralizing to be tired and hungry after a lap and a half when I thought I was going to breeze through the first few laps, but the tiredness was not muscular tiredness, it was a combination of sleepy tiredness and my body saying "why are you walking at an unnaturally fast pace when you could be running?" My guess is the hunger was because I wasn't exerting myself enough to get my body burning fat.

At some point, and I think it was after our second lap, I drank one of my emergency double espressos. I also ate a big hunk of (perhaps slightly spoiled) sweet potato. When Mark called it an early night, my mental focus turned to his situation and even though I knew he wasn't having an emergency, I was still hit hard by the fact that his body was mean enough to make him quit so early.

Just the two of us

Before too long, Jason and I fell into hundred-miler mode where we were hiking the uphill leg of the loop and running the downhill leg and the two relatively neutral legs.

I wound up with some GI distress both from a combination of what I had eaten earlier in the day and perhaps the state of the sweet potato. I had brought a "bucket potty" and kept planning on using it, but I really didn't want to and my urge to go would disappear as I was hiking and the bucket potty was where our cars were and we typically hiked that section.

By the time we had finished our sixth lap it was clear that we'd only need to do nine complete laps this year, so I gave myself something to look forward to at the end of each of the remaining laps: I was going to attempt to use to bucket potty at the end of the seventh; I was going to drink a beer at the end of the eighth and the end of the ninth would be the finish, which would allow me to drive home where I had a real toilet and more beer!

Glad I went

It was great to see Mark. It's always good to see Jason too, but we had spent a fair amount of time together two weeks prior when I paced him the last 50 miles of the Creede 100. I hadn't seen Mark since before his operation, when he, Jason and I did a "shortest double crossing."

AA 50k Origin

AA 50k was added to the Albuquerque Fat Ass series in 2012 to give people training for their first hundred miler a chance to run in the dark on a familiar, accessible, tame, course.

AA 50k Future

There's no longer a need for AA 50k, so perhaps 2022 was its final year. The people for whom AA 50k was initially set up for now have a decade of night running experience. However, hundred milers continue to gain popularity and there's a new stable of runners who might want the stepping stone that AA 50k can provide. If it is to be put on in 2023, a date will be chosen much earlier and more will be done to increase attendance.

Tour of the Rio Grande 2022

Overview

Tour of the Rio Grande is a bicycle event that offers many different ride distances. I chose to ride the Century (100 miles). I had done this event in 2019 and wanted to do it again, but it wasn't offered in 2020 and although it reappeared in 2021, it escaped my notice. As centuries go, it's fairly easy in that there's very little elevation change, but it's well done and is surprisingly social considering the fact that they don't have a post-ride beer garden.

It's not a race and—temporarily—being short of cash, I chose to use the rest stop food rather than use Tailwind in my water bottles. That meant I stopped five times. I'm also a big baby when it comes to traffic, so I took a lot more time (6:49:23) to finish this supported 100 mile ride than I did on my last unsupported rest day 100 miler (6:07:31).

Why?

I chose to ride ToRG for a few reasons.

One is that my brother-in-law has gotten into biking and he and I were going to ride some centuries this year, but he got injured. So, although our centuries together are deferred to next year, I was already looking forward to "them". In reality, although I rode the Santa Fe Century earlier this year, I probably won't be riding the Day of the Tread Century a month from now, because it conflicts with the Albuquerque Road Runners "Forever Young" footrace.

Two, in theory, I run six days week and ride my bike on Sundays. In reality, I often skip the bike ride because I'm a fair weather rider, especially after going over the handlebars due to me overly applying the break when coming up on black ice. Today, however, was good weather, so sure!

Three, I plan on running the Tortugas Mountain 24 hour race in Las Cruces on a Friday evening before returning to Albuquerque and then being the five hour pace group leader for the Duke City Marathon on the following Sunday, so by "running" (cough!) the AA 50k on Friday evening and then riding the Tour of the Rio Grande the following Sunday, I was able to make sure that the timing worked.

Notes

Off course briefly

Before the tour started, I ran into my friend Bill Dyea from search and rescue. We chatted a bit which was nice, but perhaps I should have used a little of that time to review the cue sheet, because I did miss one turn, the one going back east on Rio Bravo.

When I got to that intersection, I thought I was supposed to turn, but I looked carefully and didn't see any signs. Perhaps there was no sign, because the turn is "obvious", but I wasn't sure if there was a "backdoor" route that avoided Rio Bravo in the early afternoon when it was really busy. It's also possible that there had been a sign and it was removed or that it was still there and I just didn't look in the right place.

So, without seeing a sign and having a green light, I crossed Rio Bravo. But shortly after getting to the other side I stopped, got my bicycle out of traffic, turned on my phone, brought the course up on Gaia, saw that I made a mistake, then backtracked back to Rio Bravo and got back on course.

Trains weren't bad this year

Unlike three years ago, I only had to wait briefly at a train track crossing. There was indeed a train on the rails when I got to the infamous crossing, but it was a relatively short train and half of it had already passed.

Roadkill was

There was a ton of roadkill out. I must have seen at least a half dozen dead raccoons, two or three skunks, a couple of dead porcupines and even a coyote. Although I don't recall seeing as much roadkill three years ago, two data points isn't enough to draw any conclusions.

Signs definitely could be overlooked

Other than perhaps a sign marking the Rio Bravo turn, I didn't miss any signs that marked the course, but many people did miss the turn for the first aid station. That aid station is at the Las Lunas Railrunner (the local "commuter" train) station, but you have to take a left turn (on the way out) to get there. It's at about mile nineteen, but luckily (for the people who missed it), the second aid station is at about mile 31.

Bad (drunk?) Driver

As I was north riding on Isleta and approaching Gun Club, I saw a driver turn left from Gun Club and swing so far into the bike lane that his tires were inches from hitting the curb. The driver then overcompensated and swung past the left boundary of the lane before eventually settling into the middle. I was in no danger of being hit, because I was well behind, and I doubt that the driver would have swung that wide had I been in the way, because a bicyclist is larger than a curb, but … drivers still scare me.

Too much caffeine

Knowing that I was going to be stopping at all the aid stations and that traffic (potentially including a train) might also slow me down, I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to finish the ride in the allotted seven hours, so … I drank a quad espresso just before starting and another quad espresso at mile 50. Perhaps that was not a good choice, because I'm going to have a fair amount of trouble sleeping at my normal time tonight.

Knee held up nicely

I had injured my left knee when I fell at the Big Cottonwood Marathon fifteen days ago. My knee didn't give me any trouble at the AA 50k Friday evening and it didn't give me any trouble on this century. However, right now about seven hours after finishing, my knee is complaining.

Music as a crutch

ToRG doesn't allow people to ride with earbuds. I don't think I'd have used them even if I were allowed, because there's enough traffic that I really want to be able to hear the cars behind me. However, this ride did suggest to me that I rely on the beat of music to speed me up. In the future, I should take that into consideration.

Mt. Taylor 50k 2022

Overview

The Mt. Taylor 50k is an awesome race. No matter how much time I put into this race report, I simply will not be able to do it justice. Ken, Margaret and Kurt succinctly summarize it as

A race put on by runners, for runners.

One year they had Jim Wamsley and Betsy Kalmayer running sweep and rather than boast about them, their presence wasn't even mentioned. Oh, and Betsy was ran sweep this year, too.

History of the Mt. Taylor 50k

In 1983, Mark Lautman and Klaus Weber came up with the idea of the Mt. Taylor Winter Quadrathlon and by 1984 it was a reality. It's been drawing athletes to Grants ever since.

Kurt, one of the original co-founders of the Albuquerque Road Runners, Ken and Margaret liked the area and wanted to introduce it to Albuquerque's trail runners. They came up with an awesome course and the inaugural running even included Klaus. The winner was Shaun Martin, (Racing the Rez and 3100: Run and Become).

Shaun was also the guest speaker at that inaugural run. He mentioned "Greeting the Sunrise": running toward the east early in the morning. The Race Directors were already aware of that practice and deliberately chose the starting time to be just before daybreak so the participants could all be running toward the east as the sun rises.

Tenth (quasi eleventh) Running

This was the tenth edition. Other than 2020, it's been an annual event. There was no formal Mt. Taylor 50k in 2020 due to covid, but the first dozen or so miles of the course were marked with flour so that people who wanted to could come out and run the course on their own if they so chose.

Six lucky runners, myself included, have been able to finish all ten.

My Race

My goal was to experience beauty, have fun, finish and watch others finish. I was successful.

This write-up is primarily to remind me of what I did and what worked and what failed. It does not go into the beauty of the course or even discuss any of the terrain or features. There are excellent race reports for this race out there (and maybe I'll take the time to dig up some links after I finish my memory dump).

Camping

There are plenty of good places to camp before the race. Jeff, my brother-in-law, and I have been camping in the same place for the last few years. Were it not for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, I'd have camped at least two nights and probably three. However, I've been crewing for the same balloon pilot for far longer than I've been a runner, so Friday morning I helped with the balloon before driving over to Grants. Saturday, after helping tear-down, I drove home so I could get up Sunday and run down to the field.

I got to Grants before packet-pickup opened, so I asked if there were any chores I could do. Kim suggested I help unpack the shirts. I did so, but very inefficiently. I wasn't even a quarter of the way done with the men's shirts by the time Kim was done with the women's and she started much later than I did.

It was good to see Lynette and Kathy who were doing serious volunteering. I hung around a little longer and saw some of the early packet picker-uppers, then drove to my campsite, set my tent up and walked up to the start/finish area to see if the permanent toilet had been decorated yet (it hadn't). I meandered through another set of campsites on my way back down to my tent.

Jeff had arrived. After he set up his tent, he shared two very nice beers with me and let me help myself to the homemade hummus my sister Marcia had made. I kept going back for more, each time using a single small slice of pita to scoop up a huge glob of hummus.

We were bedazzled by some lights strung on the other side of the dirt road. Upon investigation, it was Elisha and his support group. He was going to accompany his wife in the race the following day. I met Elisha through Spencer and would see Spencer the following day since he was doing quite a bit of volunteering.

Pre-race

I slept reasonably well in my tent. My sleeping pad had a seam come loose which create an awkward bump, but that only woke me up a few times. I also woke up a few times to empty my bladder. Sometime between 4am and 5am I got up and used the Luggable Loo I had brought.

At 4:30 I had a single serving of my fortified (with hemp, chia, Udo's oil and soy milk) oatmeal. At 5:15 I had my "wake-up" double espresso and at 5:30 I had a large cup of cold coffee I had brought from Michael Thomas.

I made my way to the start line wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I got a chance to chat briefly with a ton of people. Around 6:30 I took off my sweats. I was wearing a headlamp, sunglasses on my head, some running shorts, my GPS watch, socks, shoes and custom orthotics. I did not wear a shirt, vest or carry a water bottle, but I did have a collapsible cup and some gels in the zippered compartment in my shorts.

First Loop

I remembered to drop my headlamp when I got to the collection bin. I had labeled it with my bib number back in Albuquerque. Yay! I've forgotten to drop it off previously and also remembered to drop it off but forgotten to label it previously.

Somewhere there was a chance for me to get water, and I did so using my collapsible cup. Before getting to Spud Patch I ate four (100 calorie) gels.

Spud Patch

There was frost on the ground at spud patch. I was still plenty warm without my shirt. I believe I ate two Oreos, an oatmeal cookie (which may not have been vegan) and some pretzels and drank a cupful of Tailwind and two cupfuls of water.

I almost made it back to Rock Tank without tripping. I was so close that I had already patted myself on the back for doing so when ... I caught my foot and hit the ground. Luckily, it was my right knee, because my left knee was still tender (and still scabbed over) from my fall at the Big Cotton Marathon.

Rock Tank

I had planned on wearing my ultra vest at Rock Tank, but I also had two handhelds in my drop bag "just in case". I chose to just take one handheld with me.

I ate a handful of gummy candies, and maybe a banana. I took a handful of pretzels with me. This may have been the fastest I've gotten out of Rock Tank and it would have been ever so slightly faster if my handheld had been pre-filled with water.

Second Loop

I did fall enough for my hand to hit the ground once or twice after Rock Tank and before Gooseberry, but neither knee hit.

At one point a silver haired man started running next to me and I guessed it was Senovio. He's nine years older than me but plenty faster. I jokingly like to "beat the old people", meaning finish faster than anyone my age or older, but that doesn't happen when Senovio is entered.

I chatted with Senovio a bit and brought up his daughter, because I knew he was proud that she finally beat him. Eventually, everyone slows down as they age, so a parent who has a running child will eventually be overtaken. It's a day I look forward to. Unfortunately, his daughter had some surgery that prevented her from being at Mt. Taylor.

Senovio was already running faster than I wanted to run, so after paying my respects, I slowed down and he ran out of earshot.

Gooseberry

When I got to the Gooseberry aid station, Senovio was just about to leave. At that point I knew I was running too quickly and I also didn't want my competitive nature kicking in, because Senovio would be me regardless and I'd simply beat myself up trying to keep up with him, so I had a beer and a shot instead. Sure enough, that tamped my competitive spirit.

During the ascent to the peak, I looked at my heart-rate and saw that it was around 120. In general, 130 or below I label as "leisurely", because I can run at that heart rate for hours and hours and not get beaten up too badly. As such, I felt a little bad that I wasn't moving quickly enough to be at 130, but I had a pretty good buzz and figured I had run my heart a bit faster on the first loop, so I continued my upward plod.

On my descent from the peak I slipped on a tuft of grass and slid downhill a little bit. I don't think it was from the drinking, seeing how I had fallen and hit the ground a couple times earlier when I was sober.

Water Canyon

I got into the Water Canyon aid station and asked how far Barry was in front of me. "What's his number?" "I don't know" "We can't look him up without his number" "OK". Of the six people who had run the previous nine Mt. Taylor 50ks, Barry is the fastest. I was curious as to whether he was an hour ahead of me or just a few minutes.

I chose not to have any more alcohol, because I was still buzzed. I saw some small tubs of guacamole and ate two before I saw that there was half an avocado available, so I ate that too, grabbed a handful of peanut butter pretzels and headed down.

Water Canyon Again

The hike back out of Water Canyon was sobering. Literally. so, when I got back to the Water Canyon aid station for the second time, I did have another beer. This time I only had half so someone else could have the other half.

Fairly close to the finish I asked Jeanne if she knew where Barry was "He's in back of you?" "Are you sure?" that was a foolish question, but I didn't know that he too had chosen to run this event much slower than he could.

Finish

As I approached the finish, I remembered the year when I tripped and fell with less than a quarter of a mile to go. I remembered the first year when the finish line seemed to never come. I remembered the time Jeff and I trained on Mt. Taylor and ran the second lap in reverse. I was excited to finish for the tenth time. I briefly wondered where the years went, but soon I was with fellow finishers, the organizers and volunteers. I was home.

Post Race

As always, the post-race celebration was festive. There were many stories to hear and people to cheer on. I had initially planned on heading home early since I had balloon crewing the following day, but that would have meant not seeing Crystal finish. In retrospect, I can't even believe I had even thought about leaving before helping tear down.

I drove back to Albuquerque with the bed of my truck filled with garbage bags and my head filled with inspiration.

The Future

The Mt. Taylor 50k will cease to exist if substantial volunteers don't step up. I am hoping I can do more for the race in the future, but it will be a relatively insignificant role. Between Craft Poker Co. and search-and-rescue (from which I'm currently on hiatus until craftpoker.com launches) I will not have time to do any serious organization, planning or management. Trail Marking and/or volunteering are more likely.

Feral Hog 50k Rucksack 2022

Overview

I was the only rucker, so I finished first and DFL. My official time was 7:39:12.6

Why?

I normally don't like to do events during Balloon Fiesta. I make an exception for the Mt. Taylor 50k (this year, 2016) and once for Canyon de Chelly (2014), but my plan is to do some serious ruck racing after I turn 60 and I decided this would be a good training.

In fact, I thought that having an actual race hanging over my head would keep me from drinking too much alcohol and eating too much junk food during Balloon Fiesta (unlike last year). That most definitely didn't happen. Race day came with me hoping there wouldn't be any serious competition so I would not have to push myself.

Turns out, there were no other ruckers, so all I had to do was finish before the cutoff to get first place, although if I finished within nine hours (according to the website) or eight hours (the time limit I was told when I had five miles to go) I'd get a Feral Flask.

Reprieve?

On Wednesday, three days before the race, Mary and Mike (the race directors) sent an email with the subject

Trails Currently Un-runnable - Warning Order for Possible Race Cancellation

It explained that there has been an unseasonably large amount of rain and that the trail couldn't safely be marked. Knowing that the weather forecast was for more rain, I thought it would be canceled, and I ate and drink on Wednesday as if I had dodged a bullet.

However Thursday morning we were updated:

Feral Hog is a go!!

What wound up happening was a compromise. The first half of the 25k was substituted for the second half of the 50k. This may have made the course a little tougher, because the second half had less elevation change, I think.

Team RWB

Three fellow Team RWB members (Roleen, Rhoda and Brianna) were volunteering and one was running the 25k (Kathy). I haven't done much with Team RWB lately, so that made seeing them especially sentimental.

Rain

It did indeed rain all day, although there was never a downpour. At it's lightest it was basically a mist. At its heaviest it was constant, but not pelting. I heard thunder only once and never saw lightning.

The rain did necessitate me running with the rain-cover on my pack. That made access to my pack's contents sufficiently awkward that I only got into it once, at the halfway point. I had a temperature sensitive toothache and the hot miso I was drinking was irritating it. To get to my ibuprofen I had to untie my belt, take the pack off, set it somewhere stable, remove a couple straps that held the rain-cover on, and unzip a side pocket. The "somewhere stable" is a little tricky, because even though the pack itself only weighed a little more than twenty pounds, that could have been enough to push over one of the lightweight poles holding up the canopy over the smaller aid station.

So, the rain was annoying in and of itself, however…

Mud

The mud was worse than the rain. Some of the mud was caliche, which can be super slippery and can also stick to shoes, adding weight and weird padding. This race was one of the few times I half-heartedly wished I had a video camera recording some of the terrain. It was nuts.

Since there was little time pressure on me, I slowed down quite a bit anywhere the footing was dicey. I still managed to fall in the mud once, when I simply underestimated the slope and slipperiness of my path. Sure enough, I wound up with some caliche mud stuck to my leg for the rest of the race (and the drive home).

Chafing

I normally wear two panty liners on my back when rucking at speed. These both lessen the chafing and suck up extra blood from chafing. However, when training I put them on using a mirror and at the Bataan Memorial Death March I have someone else apply them. For this event, I did it myself, without a mirror and may not have gotten one of them positioned where it would do the most good.

I also had to take my pack off at an aid station so it could be weighed. I'm pretty sure one of my pads shifted when I did that, because I did get enough chafing afterward to slow me down. It's not excruciating to have a pack sliding up and down on raw flesh, but it something I feel with each step and the faster I run the more I feel it, so there were sections of the course in the second half where I could have run faster but chose not to.

Too Much Salt?

There was plenty for me to eat, and each aid station had hot miso. It was about fifty degrees Fahrenheit and raining, so I had plenty of miso at each stop. I don't know why, but pretzels were especially appealing to me, so each time I left an aid station I grabbed a handful of them.

As the event progressed, my fingers, and later my hands, started swelling. At the end, when the race directors were considering throwing out the remaining miso, I volunteered to drink the amount my finisher's cup would hold. By then my swelling was pronounced, but I knew I had peed regularly and figured that I'd pee even more since I also had a beer and twenty-four ounces of rice milk.

This is the first time I have had significant swelling in a long time. I assume it was from all the salt I was consuming. I don't normally take salt supplements, although I often drink some Tailwind as I run. Lately I've been too broke to keep buying Tailwind and this course had free Heed, but I don't like heed, so most of my liquid was miso, and the liquid in pickles. I started with about fifty ounces of water in my bladder, but only drank about ten ounces of it; I wasn't sweating much considering my slow pace, relatively lightweight pack and the constant cool rain.

Other than the swelling, I had no discomfort and although I was going slowly due to chafing and mud, I was not sluggish. So I don't think I had hyponatremia or kidney or liver trouble. The fact that the swelling decreased steadily after the race was over reinforces my belief that I wasn't at risk of injury due to the swelling, but it is something I would have been concerned with if were only a quarter of the way done with my race when my hands were as big as they were. It's definitely something for me to watch in the future.

An Excellent Event in Trying Circumstances

My hat is off to Mary and Mike. They put on an excellent event with very uncooperative weather. Presumably it would have been much easier for them to simply cancel than to do the reroute. I am glad that they didn't. Race Directing is a hard work. Putting on a race in New Mexico immediately adjacent to the Mt. Taylor 50k has to be tough. I applaud the addition of this race to our locale.

Previous Years

I was able to find links to the three previous Feral Hog 50k rucks that were held in Ohio:

• 2016
• 2017
• 2018

I do not know the area, but Wikipedia shows Batavia's elevation as 594 feet, but a race report from 2018 mentions hills, creek and river crossings, and 1,618 feet of gain in the first 20.31 miles, so the Ohio course appears to be comparable to the New Mexico one (Ohio having more water crosings, New Mexico being at a higher altitude).

Tortugas Mountain 24 Hour Challenge 2022

Overview

I completed fourteen loops: four before sleeping, ten after. I was in the open division, not the drinking division, but I did drink a bit. Several people finished with more loops than I did, but I needed to be very conservative so that I could return to Albuquerque (a three and half hour drive) after the awards ceremony in order to be the five hour pace group leader for the Duke City marathon.

Pre-Race

The day before the race, I borrowed $100 from my son for gas money. I didn't think that would be enough for all the gas I would consume, but I still had some cash in my wallet and a tiny bit in the bank which I could use via my debit card.

On race day, I woke up and went to make my wife a cappuccino only to realize we were out of espresso beans. Oops! We had been using fairly scruffy beans of late, so I chose to drive down to Michael Thomas and get some excellent beans. I knew the expenditure might leave me without enough money for gas on the way home, but after some work on my truck, I didn't have an estimate of the miles per gallon I'd get on the trip. I thought I'd be fine but knew that if I was wrong I could borrow money from any of a number of people I knew who would be at the race.

Instead of driving directly to the start/finish site, I drove to Spotted Dog Brewery because I had an empty growler with a gift card good for a fill attached to it. It was awarded to me for finishing first in the drinking division last year. I didn't fill it last year because it was awarded at the end of the race and by then I had already drunk fourteen beers during the course of the race and another celebratory beer or two after. They had a wee heavy on tap, so I chose that, but needed to pay about an extra ten bucks because of inflation and/or the wee heavy being a bit pricier (after all, at 9.5% ABV it is about double the strength of normal beer). I tipped $5, because by then I was reasonably sure I was going to need to hit someone up for some additional gas money and I didn't want my current cash-poor situation turning me into a stingy bastard.

From Spotted Dog, I drove to the Monte Vista Hiking Trail Parking Log. That's where the start/finish line is and where I camp. I got there about and hour and a half before the race was due to start, which was an hour before the drinkers were going to have a rule-change meeting. Although I wasn't going to participate in the drinking division, I had had an epiphany and realized that I could still drink a bit at the beginning without it jeopardizing my health (e.g., allowing me to catch a cold) or otherwise decreasing my ability to pace the Duke City Marathon.

That hour and a half was enough time for me to set up my tent and socialize. Embarrassingly, I did not recognize Rob, the founder of this event. I know Rob's son Justin better than Rob, although it's been a few years since I've seen Justin and I probably couldn't pick him out of crowd either. In addition to Rob, who lives in Las Cruces, Kathy had driven down from Albuquerque. Kathy had done the Feral Hog 25k six days prior, so she and I were the only Feral Hog participants who were also doing the 24 Hour Challenge. That makes us Feral Tortugas!

In some sense, however, the two most important people I ran into were Perky and Prince Charming. They had ponied up for the two porta potties. Yay! As we chatted, I found out that the winners (male and female) of the beer division were not going to get a growler this year. I didn't yet know why, but I did volunteer that I had just picked up a growler of wee heavy and before I had even asked about borrowing gas money, Perky volunteered to by the growler for me. I asked for $20, which was the amount I was going to borrow, but she handed me $30. I wasn't going to fight her over the extra, especially since Prince Charming could break me in half like a toothpick.

In the blink of an eye, it was five-thirty, a half hour before race start and the beer drinkers gathered to hear the new rules and the big surprise. Instead of only the winners of the beer division getting a gift, everyone who was going to drink a beer at this little meeting (i.e., before the first lap) got a very nice large beer stein with the Beer Soaked logo and the epitaph "It's my own damn fault!" I drank a 16 oz. 7.5% ABV Malpais Stout and thanked Rob profusely for this participant's award.

In the days leading up to this race I had decided that since I wasn't going to compete, I'd make an already social event even more social by running each loop with a different person and chatting with (at?) them. However, I never articulated this plan, which was good, because I changed my mind when I remembered that I often have a Zoom meeting with a bunch of friends on Friday, Saturday and occasionally Wednesday evenings at 6pm, which was the starting time for Tortugas Mountain. They knew I was a crazy person who liked to run in circles, now I got a chance to show them.

Loops Before Bed

I finished four loops before heading into my tent to sleep.

So, I used my phone to join the Zoom meeting, explained to the people on the meeting what I was doing, then switched to the forward facing camera and stayed on the meeting until the final person dropped off about four hours later.

Before my second loop I had a 12 oz. 7% ABV Social Hour and before my third loop I had a 12 oz. 7% ABV Sunset Hazy IPA. On my fourth lap I fell from grace and did not drink a beer. This was according to plan. I had already had the equivalent of five beers due to the first one being a pint rather than twelve ounces and all of them being stronger than 5% ABV. When competing in the drinking division, you must drink a beer each loop (in previous years it was before each loop, i.e. in the start/finish area, but this year they relaxed the rules and allow you to drink the beer as you run/hike/walk/stumble). As such, when competing in the drinking division, it makes sense to have the weakest beer allowed (5% ABV) and the smallest amount (12 oz.) because drinking stronger beer adds up (just ask Jason, who was drinking 7% ABV beers at the beginning last year!). However, since I was in the open division, stacking a little more alcohol early was just that much more social lubricant for my zoom call.

My plan had been to finish five or six laps before going to bed, but I hadn't really thought things through and I hadn't even considered the Zoom call, which slowed me down a bit. So when I saw that it was about eleven thirty at the end of my fourth lap, I decided it was a good time to stop and get some sleep.

It took me a little while to sleep and I woke up a few times, both to use my pee bottle and to hear some fun friendly noise as various runners finished their laps. That was great, it meant that even my sleeping was semi-social.

At 5:15 my alarm went off like it usually does and I had the double espresso I had made at home and brought with me. I probably have a double espresso at 5:15 Mountain time 360 days a year. Every once in a while I shift when I have it, but only in extenuating circumstances. I typically wake up well before 5:15 but wait until 5:15 (on the second!) to drink the espresso because I use it to synchronize my sleep so that I don't get up earlier and earlier or later and later and to also tell my GI system to do its thing.

It was still dark out, so I put my Kogolla light bar and Petzl headlamp back on (those are what I was using the night before) putzed around a bit hoping for the caffeine to allow me to take a dump, got impatient and finally started my next loops at 5:36am.

Loops After Bed

I completed ten loops after sleeping.

Although I had much less sleep and a lower quality of sleep than normal, I felt great. My lighting was excellent and it was a bit cooler. I ran my first few post-bedtime laps in a little under an hour each, and that includes the time I was taking to eat like a piggy at the start/finish aid station as well as at the aid station that is roughly at the half-way point.

I had really enjoyed my Zoom the night before, so I did something similar at 11am. I have a different group of people who have a recurring 11am daily zoom. I've known some of these people for close to thirty years but I only recently found out that they had this Zoom call every day (perhaps I knew that at one point and forgot, but I'm not on Facebook and I don't recall reading about it on our mailing list). There were only two others on the call, but it was fun to do a show-and-tell and answer questions for about a half hour.

Like many a looped-course ultra, this race was run "washing-machine" style, meaning runners switch directions for each loop. The first and all odd loops were run clockwise (as viewed from above), the second and all even loops counter-clockwise. That allows competitors to see their competition and allows social participants to see the entire field, at least briefly, several times. However, it did conspire against allowing me to spend time with Lukas, the winner. We were chatting a little bit at the start/finish aid station, and we continued our conversation as we jogged together back to the main course, but, alas, he turned right and I turned left. For the next several loops, I'd see Lukas at the start/finish aid station, it was almost like clockwork. The difference though is that before we synced up he had already run seven more laps than I had! He also chose to run a final lap after I had called it a day, so he got twenty-two laps in all told, while I finished a mere fourteen.

Around 2pm I was finishing my twelfth lap and I had already worked out the numbers. If I sped up a little I could get three more laps in before the 6pm finish time, but that would be taxing, might increase my chance of injury and would leave me little time to tear down my tent and put things away before the awards ceremony. As such, I decided that I would do fourteen laps this year, just like last year, but since it was in the open division, I wouldn't even podium. Last year my fourteen laps (and fourteen "beers" (they were mostly hard seltzers which I might explain sometime, but not now)) was not just first place in the drinking division but a new course record.

Once I realized I was only going to do two more laps, I decided to see if I could mooch a beer for each of my two final laps. There would be four hours between the first of the two beers and the end of the race and about two and a half before the second beer and the end of the race and even after the end of the race was the awards ceremony, so I would still be able to drive safely, legally and comfortably. I came into the aid station and asked if anyone could give me a beer and the few people who were there were all out of beer! Someone, however, (Marco?), let me know that earlier Perky and Prince Charming had offered him a beer which he had declined, so he retroactively accepted that beer and gave it to me (i.e., we pilfered a Miller High Life from their cooler). I know P&PC well enough to know that they wouldn't mind and that I probably was not draining them dry.

Guess whom I saw when finishing my thirteenth lap!? Sure enough P&PC were at their tailgate, parked next to my truck, and I got to confess my sin. They were amused and volunteered to give me another beer. I could have another Miller High Life or—what the heck&mash;we could open the growler. They even had a nice small plastic cup I could pour the growler into. I was sold. I did have to be careful to limit myself, because this was indeed stronger brew, but it was only 3:30pm and I wouldn't be driving until 6:15 or 6:30.

I had some of the wee heavy and was futzing with my stuff as P&PC departed. Like I, they were going to head out on a counter-clockwise loop. I knew I would catch up with them and this time, I'd actually hang out and chat on the loop. So, a little while later I topped off my beer and headed up. I wanted to catch up, but I also didn't want to spill my beer. I didn't execute perfectly and there was a little sloshing over the side, but shortly I was within chatting distance.

Perky walks quickly! Here walking pace is slower than mine, so she would get ahead of Prince Charming and myself and eventually PC would remind me to run a bit to catch up so that I wouldn't have to shout so much. We had good time catching up and discussing our plans for 2023.

Post-Race

At 5:09 I was done with my laps and done drinking until after noon the following day. I pulled out my cooler and spent about a half hour packing my sleeping mat, eating recovery food fortified (with chia seeds, hemp seeds, soy milk and Udo's Oil)) oatmeal, nasty green drink, rice milk and some spaghetti and most importantly listening to everyone's stories. I then hastily packed my tent, gathered the rest of my gear and shoved everything in my truck so that I could be back for the awards ceremony.

The two times I've done this previously, I've left my tent set up and gone back to it after the ceremony. This year, with the start of the Duke City Marathon less than thirteen hours away, I said thanks, hopped in my truck, drove to a gas station, bought fifty dollars of fuel, saw that my tank was almost full, crossed my fingers and got on the road. Oh, while the gas was pumping, I had the choice: eat more spaghetti or clean the bug blots off my windshield. The splats were a bit of a nuisance, but I was hungry, so I left them there.

My drive back was mostly uneventful. I was not tired. I was not wired. I wasn't overly anxious, but I did continue looking at the gas gauge with regularity. I had one obnoxious driver to deal with, but luckily that vehicle pulled off in Truth or Consequences (that's the name of a town).

Everything was basically going fine until I ran into a little rain. My truck has fairly dim headlights (although they're a little bit brighter than they had been a few days go before I replaced a bulb) and my night vision isn't great. My windshield wipers are pretty poor, but it wasn't supposed to rain until the next day, or at least that's what I thought. Had I known it would rain, I wouldn't have eaten that spaghetti. Light rain, bug bits, and poor windshield wipers are a bad combination, especially at night. Luckily, there were some gaps in the slime that I could see through until the rain came down harder and everything got cleaned up.

I got home around 9:30, started charging my electrical stuff, took a shower, put away a few things, set my alarm for 4:30am and got to bed around 11pm. Tomorrow would be fun (and I'm not being sarcastic).

Whee!

"Food"

I brought some food from Albuquerque and think I might have had enough calories to squeak by, but there was yummy junk food at the aid stations so I ate a ton of that during the race.

Sophie had made a bunch of potato slices roasted in spiced oil. I had a few in Albuquerque for lunch, then stuffed a lot more in a baggie for the drive down. Sure enough, I ate them all.

Before the race I ate a bag of lentils (2/3rds cup when they were dry). I had made an entire package of spaghetti (approximately 2,000 calories), but only ate a little of that during the race. Most came back to Albuquerque with me and I ate it on the Monday and Tuesday after the race.

Sophie had made some homemade hummus and I took half of it with me in a baggie. With the baggie sitting on top of the ice in the cooler, the hummus took on a Play-Doh consistency, which was great, because I could tear off a piece and eat it without utensils. I also brought a baggie of steamed broccoli and cauliflower that I ate mid-day Saturday.

I ate a huge amount of aid station "orange slice" candies and pretzels on both days. Thanks!

On Saturday, I additionally snacked on salt & vinegar potato chips, some vegan cookies that were kind of like cream colored Oreos and some vegan Dijon mustard crisps. I had a Mountain Dew after each of my first two Saturday laps.

At the remote aid station, after I had eaten all the orange slice candies, I had a big handful of M&Ms and eight tiny Twix bites. Neither of those are vegan; they both have milk in them. I believe those were the only two non-vegan things I consumed.

Minor Setbacks

Chafing

I did not bring Body Glide and my running shorts irritated me a little bit. I also was wearing an ultra-vest without a shirt when I was using my Kogolla light bar because I wanted something to hold the battery and (when not Zooming) my iPod touch. However, at one point I also added tube filled with water and that extra pressure was enough to chafe my right nipple. Eventually I realized what was going on and moved the water to the other side and everything was fine.

Sunburn

I didn't wear any sunscreen, so I got a minor sunburn. I definitely didn't feel it at the time, so I don't think it slowed me down appreciably. I felt it slightly after getting home. Over the next couple of days the red turned to tan, so I'm happy.

Falling

I fell and hit the ground a few times. The first two or three times were, IIRC, Saturday, i.e., after I had slept, before I was drinking beer again. I tore some skin here and there but none were bad enough to introduce a limp or cause trouble post race.

Heat

I had meant to bring my ice hat and use it, both because I think it speeds me up, but also to get a little practice with it before Javelina Jundred. I even had it in the file that I created that had the list of things to bring, but I forgot to look at that file.

Music Driven Legs

I easily get the runner's high. While I have it, music often hits me emotionally. I feel like I'm a bull being led by a nose-ring and when the music is upbeat or perhaps just emotionally satisfying, I sometimes use it to drive my legs. One song that touched me while I was out there was City of New Orleans. City of New Orleans was written by Steve Goodman but made famous by Arlo Guthrie. Neither of those two were singing it, but since it came off my iPod library, I might eventually figure out whose version it was.

Listening to anything Steve Goodman had to do with always brings out a mix of emotions in me. The guy died of cancer when he was 36 but penned and performed many a classic. City of New Orleans isn't particularly fast, and I find it melancholy, but it was definitely driving my legs hard as I finished up one of my daylight even laps. I can't remember the other songs that wound me up, although one of them was by Jesus Jones.

Historical

The Tortuga Mountain 24 Hour Challenge started out as a drinking event, where all participants were required to drink a beer before each 4 mile loop around Tortugas Mountain (also known as "A" Mountain due to the capital 'A' in white rock on the hill that is visible for miles). The beer needed to be 12 ounces or more and 5% ABV or more.

As the event became popular, some people chose to do it without all the beer, so separate divisions were created. These divisions are recognized at the event itself, but are not made in the UltraSignup results. So, you can either take my word or ask a race director, but in 2021, I set a new course record of 14 beers and 56 miles.

Duke City Marathon 2022

Overview

I ran 4:59:51, much (i.e., nine seconds) too quickly. My miles weren't particularly consistent, either, with my fastest complete mile being 10:58 and my final .43 mile being 10:21. My slowest mile was 12:01.

Practice

I take my pacing seriously. In the week before DCM, I did four 4.0 mile test runs, where my goal was to run an 11:27 pace for exactly 4 miles. I hit my goal each day:

• 45:56
• 45:56
• 45:54
• 45:54

I used two GPS watches, one showing my my overall average pace and the other showing me my instantaneous pace. The problem is that neither watch gives me a particularly accurate instantaneous pace, but with both watches and practice I can do fairly well.

Sign-Up

I got to run this for free, so I don't want to sound like I'm whining, but there always seems to be additional complication doing this as a pacer, because instead of using an online form to register, I got a PDF which I then filled out and submitted to Glenda which she then submitted to the Duke City Marathon people.

Just as I was approaching the Spotted Dog Brewery I got a text message:

Hey Clifford, this is [redacted] with the Duke City Marathon. We received your form, but there is no race checked off. Can you please let me know which race you would like to run

At a light I responded with

"Marathon. I'm the 5 hour pace group leader"

I didn't attempt to look up my details while I was away from home (doing the Tortugas 24 Hour Challenge). Race morning I wanted to see how people could track me and I found I was listed as "Cliff", not "Clifford" as I had written on the form and as I was messaged. Even worse, my age was listed as 42. These differences don't matter to me personally, but streamlining and bug-fixing the pacer process might allow DCM to get more pacers in the future.

Weather

On Friday morning, before I left for Las Cruces (returning Saturday evening), I had already checked the DCM race-day weather and saw that it was going to be low fifties, winds around twenty five miles per hour and rain. Wind (except when it's a tailwind) is always annoying, especially when carrying a sign, but my big worry was that I am used to dressing lightly and speeding up to keep my body warm. As a pacer, it's my duty to keep a steady pace. So I set aside a long sleeve shirt, a fleece hat, light rain jacket, gloves and hand warmers for race day morning.

Pre-Race

My alarm went off at 4:30 and I downed a double espresso that I had made previously. Almost every other day I have my double espresso at 5:15, but I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to poop before driving to the convention center.

I ate a 533 calorie serving of my fortified oatmeal at 4:45. If it hadn't been for the weather, I'd have probably just started the race in a fasted state, since I can run or bike slowly for several hours in that state. However, I didn't want to risk it, since it was my duty to keep a steady pace.

I got to the convention center parking lot with plenty of time to spare. I made my way to the Albuquerque Road Runners bag drop to pick up my bib and sign. I chatted a bit with Dennis and Glenda and as time passed, I decided to ditch more and more of my rain gear. Eventually I decided to use the hand warmers (because they're trivial to throw away if they get annoying) and to tie my rain jacket around my waist.

As usual, the Road Runners had a huge bowl of tiny Tootsie Rolls an as usual, I ate a whole bunch of them.

At some point, I Judy (see below) introduced herself to me and let me know she was going to run around my pace because she was training for an upcoming fifty miler. Yay! Go Judy!

I met Andrew, the 3:45 pace group leader and Nick, the 4:00 pace group leader. We chatted a bit about running, then headed out to hold up our signs so people could find us.

Days after finishing DCM, I looked up Nick on UltraSignup and saw that he had come in 3rd! (just after Luke Nelson!) in the Plain 100 in 2021. I am not worthy; I suck at navigating (although I'm OK with a pack).

The Race

First Half

As usual, I was a chatterbox in the first half. I volunteered a lot of advice to anyone willing to listen or who was stuck nearby. I tried to emphasize that people are different and that I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, and I tried to add some self-deprecating remarks, but who knows?

I tried to get names and stories from people running with me, but I didn't take notes after the race and so I've already forgotten many details. Four people I do remember are:

• Judy, an ultra runner with an upcoming 50 miler
• Chris, an Economics Ph.D. student, former programmer and poker enthusiast
• Michael, a jiu-jitsu fighter from Arizona
• Gus, who was sufficiently silent in the first half to escape my attempted friendliness

In the first mile I mentioned that I think the shorter the distance a race is, the harder it is. I elaborated to Chris, by mentioning that typically goals change due to the distance. i.e., when you're sprinting, your only goal is to finish as quickly as possible; when you're running a marathon your goal tends to be to PR and/or correct previous mistakes, but when running an ultra often your only goal is to finish.

Judy and I talked a little bit about ultra-running before she got ahead of me.

Before too long, Michael and I traded story after story. That may have been boring (or worse!) for the others, but we didn't care; we were clicking off miles and having a great day. As the turn-around approached, Michael bid me goodbye, knowing that he was going to run the second half a little slower.

I noticed Gus, but at this point he wasn't part of the conversation and I didn't know whether he was deliberately running our pace or if he just happened to be there. In retrospect, heh!

Second Half

After the turnaround, I saw the 13 mile sign, checked my GPS watch and saw that it said 13.18 miles. Uh oh. That's a big enough discrepancy that a 11:27 pace is not going to get me to the finish line in five hours. Although I'd like to hit five hours exactly, I'd rather finish slightly early than slightly late, because if anyone is following me and wants to get sub five, they may not think about the fact that it's chip timed and they may have started in front of me, in which case they need to finish in front of me too. Being early just exacerbates that problem.

Since there was a little bit of a tailwind, I chose to speed up a little bit and bring my average pace to around 11:24. I also decided that I should probably ingest some calories, since I hadn't eaten or drank anything since the race started. I had five gels with me and planned on eating three, but I accidentally got four out, so that's what I ate. Tearing open the packets and making sure not to accidentally drop anything while holding the "5:00" sign was an exercise in clumsiness, but I got it done.

Before too long I started having a cup of water at some of the aid stations. I'm a firm believer in drinking only when I'm thirsty and I hadn't been thirsty up until then. Between it getting warmer, me having more miles on my legs and the gels (at least two of the four were caffeinated), I got slightly thirsty, so I drank a little here and there.

As I ran westward on Paseo del Norte I ran into Judy. Looking at my splits, I now know I was running about a 10:57 minute/mile pace. At the time I knew I was running faster than 11:27 because I was trying go get down to 11:24 overall. If I had confidence in the mile marking and my math, I might have tried to run a little slower, but I figured if I was going to make a mistake and run a little too quickly, doing so here, with the tailwind and before everyone was hitting the wall would be best.

Not too long after turning south on the Bosque Bike Path, I had a chance to chat with Julie, a 50 states member who plans to finish in Hawaii. She told me how many states she had left and I think it was eight. I believe she's hoping to finish three or four a year.

If I remember correctly, it wasn't too long after chatting with Julie that I started talking with Chris again. Eventually I confessed to be working on poker software and we chatted a bit about that. Unfortunately, I got wrapped up in the conversation and let my pace gradually speed up. I don't know if it was due to my increased pace, but Chris developed a cramp at some point and I didn't see him again, although looking at the results I see he (5:20:58) and Julie (5:20:53) finished within five seconds of each other. Neat!

I sort of thought I was all alone, except the quiet guy was still there. I think it was around twenty miles in when I started chatting him up. He seemed to be breathing a bit hard, so initially I expected him to drop off, but it turns out he had been deliberately following me because he had indeed wanted to finish sub five.

Eventually I learned this formerly silent guy was Gus. What I didn't know until after the race was over is that my ultra running friend John Hancock had pointed Gus at me. Gus had found John through Strava and when John heard that Gus wanted to run sub five he pointed me out. I had seen John before the race start and he even mentioned that he had sent someone my way, but at the time Gus wasn't around, so I didn't know whom he had sent.

One of the markers—23, I think—toward the end of the course agreed with my watch. This was a little disconcerting, because most of the previous ones had all been around .2 miles further than my watch was claiming I had run. If this new one was correct, then I've been running much too fast, so once again I slowed down a bit, only to get to find the next sign about .2 miles further than my GPS watch said. D'oh!

I don't know for sure what was happening with the signs. I believe courses are supposed to be measured by running a wheel along the shortest distance within the cones and I most definitely wasn't running the tangents. However, at one point—25, I think—the marathon and half marathon distance signs were fairly close to each other and since the rest of the course was shared, that couldn't be right, because they should be a tenth of a mile apart.

With less than a mile to go I encouraged Gus to run ahead so that he would lock down his sub-five (which he did with a 4:59:38 finish). I was alone and trying to adjust my speed to take into consideration how much further I thought might be left in both distance and time. Someone saw me approaching him and shouted

"Oh no you don't!"

and sped up. He was going for sub-five. I occasionally shouted "Run!" at him because I didn't want him to be caught short by the chip timing.

Post Race

As I approached the finish line it was clear I was going to finish too quickly. I slowed down to add a few seconds, but I didn't want to slow too much (much less come to a complete stop) in order to finish closer to 5:00:00. This was not the year to beat my record of being only three seconds off.

Glenda found me after crossing the finish line as did John Hancock. That's when I learned that Gus had been sent by John. I returned to the ARR bag drop area and fetched some recovery food (another serving of fortified oatmeal) and beverages (rice milk and a Best Energy Electrolyte Replacement).

I hung around the bag drop area until they were ready to tear down most of it. I then helped schlep some of the gear to Dennis's car before driving over to Marcia's and Jeff's where the fed and beveraged me.

Historical

This was my fourth time leading the five hour pace group. I started doing it in 2017 and decided to do it every year, but there was no DCM in 2020 due to covid and the Albuquerque Road Runners didn't supply pace group leaders in 2021, so my streak is sort of unbroken.

• 2017 4:59:54
• 2018 5:00:03
• 2019 5:00:19

My goal was to run a steady 4:27 minute / mile and then to adjust my speed in the last quarter to half mile to cross the timing mat at exactly 5:00:00. This was a little tricky because my GPS watch wasn't necessarily going to agree on the distance in the best of circumstances, but especially with this year's mile marker placements.

I was a little nervous running a 24 hour race the day before (i.e. the end of the 24-hour event was thirteen hours before the start of DCM), although I did have precedent for running a big event the day before. Although in 2017, I hadn't run anything since the Mt. Taylor 50k three weeks and a day prior, in 2018 I ran the White Mesa 50k the day before and in 2019 I ran the Sandia Crossing Marathon 7:24:30 the day before. It's not that I deliberately look for events to do the day before the Duke City Marathon, it's just that running at an 11:27 min/mile pace is not that challenging.

So, this year, when I found that the Tortugas Mountain 24 Hour Challenge was being held in Las Cruces the day before, I chose to do the challenge, but enter the non-drinking division and cap my miles at 60 (or 64). Initially I had also planned on not drinking during Tortugas Mountain, but I changed my mind and simply drank considerably less and delayed my celebratory drinking until post DCM.

It all worked out fine, but the drive back from Las Cruces was a bit nerve-racking, because I didn't know when I'd get to sleep, how well I'd sleep or how fit I would feel in the morning. Turns out, I got to bed late, slept poorly, felt great and had no trouble performing my pacing duties.

Pix

I participate in so many events that it's exceedingly rare that I buy photos (especially since some events provide photos for free), but Foggy Bay Photos was out taking pictures and here are the ones they took of me.

More to Add, Later

All told, I took 800mg of ibuprofen: 400mg around 4:45am, with my fortified oatmeal and another 400mg soon after having my gels, just past the turnaround.

The first amount of ibuprofen was to counter any minor discomfort that might show up due to my participation in the Tortugas Mountain 24-Hour Challenge. The latter was due to minor discomfort that I was feeling in my knees, that I think was due to the way carrying a sign altered my gait.

Ibuprofen is a tricky subject, so my plan is to eventually create a section of this book that explains when I use it and why and also mentions some of the risks. I've had at least two good friends of mine go to the hospital for kidney failure due, in part, to overuse of ibuprofen. So, rather than mentioning that in this race report, I'll eventually take the time to mention it in the upcoming Ibuprofen section of my upcoming Drugs section of my upcoming Practices section.

I don't know when I'll get to the above. I do have a Day Job¹.

Tatonka 5k 2022

Overview

Like Memorial Day, the Tatonka 5k is both a somber reflection of tragic loss as well as a celebration of life and values. Billed as a Fun Run, it is an event put on by the brother and mother of SFC Matthew Q. McClintock, RIP.

I managed to not trip and keep my heart rate up fairly high considering I didn't have any extra pre-race caffeine. My effort was sufficient to get me nineteenth place.

What the Ruck?

I chose to run the 5k wearing my backpack filled to the weight I train with. Specifically, when training on level ground I get the pack to weigh at least forty pounds. In this case it was forty-one point eight pounds, because I didn't want to alter its contents after having run a leisurely training run three days prior.

Last year I rode the Day of the Tread bicycle Century six days prior to Javelina Jundred. I had planned on doing the same this year, until I saw that Forever Young, an Albuquerque Road Runners race that has been held in April in the past, was going to be held on the same day as Day of the Tread. "Good! I can take Saturday off, run my guts out at Forever Young and still beat myself up less than slowly riding DotT" I thought to myself.

However, I learned about the Tatonka 5k when the results for the Feral Hog 50k was posted. It was an excellent cause and it was the day before Forever Young, so I decided to do both. Since I'll be doing some serious rucking in 2023, I figured I could just slap my ruck on and get some decent training effect.

Pre Race

The race was scheduled to start at 10am which is something my body isn't used to. So, I got there a bit early just so I could try to calm my GI tract. While I was there, I ran into a familiar face from the pre-covid Albuquerque Team RWB chapter. Sadly, I couldn't remember his name immediately, so I fessed up and asked. "Don!" Of course.

Don and I chatted a bit here and there, including what's been going on in his life the last few years. Somehow the Cocodona 250 came up and I mentioned that because I had to do it without a crew or pacer, I wound up running it very conservatively which meant I was sufficiently fresh at the Mt. Elden aid station that I could drink a beer and have a shot of Cinnamon Fireball.

The Race

The race, like the annual Memorial Day service, was held in the New Mexico Veterans Memorial. The course was designed to allow the runners to see some of the key features of the memorial, which was great, but it was a bit "squirrelly". There were several turns and the surface was a mix of asphalt, dirt, concrete and even some grass.

I had to pay close attention not to trip and fall. I do not like falling when running with my pack, especially falling when I'm turning a corner. It's bad enough scraping my knees when falling forward, but the one or two times when I've fallen while turning a corner, I've jacked up my shoulders. Luckily, those falls happen up in the Sandias where there's nobody to see. It's not that I'd be embarrassed to have someone see me fall; I have no shame. It's just that when I do fall during races (e.g. during the Big Cottonwood Marathon 2022) it freaks people out and mars their race.

So, my primary goal was to not trip. My secondary goal was to run hard and not take my foot off the gas. I succeeded in both. Yay!

Post Race

Before Don finished, I had a celebratory beer, and started eating my fortified oatmeal, and drinking my rice milk. Then I congratulated Don on finishing before sitting down and chatting with a few runners I didn't know.

They collected people's bibs an then drew door prizes and Don won a gigantic plastic candy cane filled with—what a strange coincidence—shots of Cinnamon Fireball. I don't take a lot of selfies, but when I do, I'm often drinking.

"Cheers!"

I ate couple handfuls of pretzels, watched the awards ceremony, then left for an afternoon of doing things on "that side of town", which included buying coffee, buying beer, drinking beer with my sister and brother-in-law and visiting my mom.

Oh, and on my way back to my truck, before those errands and visits, I cried a bit.

Historical

Just in case the Tatonka 5k link goes stale, here's what it said:

The 7th Annual Tatonka 5K Trail Run is a fundraising fun run to raise money for Green Beret Foundation in memory of SFC Matthew Q. McClintock. The Green Beret Foundation helps soldiers and their families with needs like family care, medical support, travel, careers, etc. Matthew passed away on January 5th, 2016 while helping to save his teammates in Afghanistan. All of his teammates survived the mission. He will always be remembered as an American Hero. He put his life on the line to be out there fighting with his teammates and would do it 1000 times over again because that's what they do. They do whatever it takes to have each other's backs. Matthew was 30 years old. He is survived by his wife and 6 year old son.

All funds raised will go to the Green Beret Foundation.

This year we are moving to a beautiful new venue! The Veterans Memorial Park at 1100 Louisiana Blvd SE in Albuquerque. The park has some wonderful areas with information about lots of our New Mexico veterans. The course will be rather circuitous but allow us to take you to the most interesting places in the park. You will run, jog or walk 3 laps of the 1.1 mile loop finishing in the amphitheatre for the awards. Highlight the links below for all the race details and course map.

Matthew's mother did some of the emceeing of the event and his brother—who came up with the idea of a run to celebrate Matthew's life—was out and about doing several things including leading the way around the first lap.

Forever Young 6 miler 2022

Overview

My official time was 47:18.0. That's a pretty big difference from 49:50, which is what my GPS watch recorded. In 2019, my official time was 48:05, which is just a few seconds different from what my GPS watch said.

Looking at my splits, my guess is my GPS watch is closer to the truth than the official time. Using my GPS watch time gives me an 8:17 min/mile average pace.

I chose to race—not merely run—this event, meaning I went as hard as I could, at least until the final mile or so when it was clear that I wasn't going to overtake anyone and nobody was going to overtake me.

Gene Kersh is the only person older than I who finished before I did. However, Gene is 64 and I'm not yet 60 and Gene beat me by over a minute!

Pre Race

I botched my Tatonka 5k recovery in two ways. Saturday morning, I accidentally left my lunch at home, which resulted in me eating different food (and much more food) after Tatonka than I had planned. I also let a toothache get out of control, so I wound up waking up several times in the night between Tatonka and Forever Young.

On Forever Young race day, since my gut had more in it than normal and since I was more tired than I expected to be, I doubled down on caffeine and had both a 12 oz. Michael Thomas light roast coffee as well as a quad espresso before the race. I was hoping the extra caffeine would stimulate my GI system and also lessen the tooth discomfort. I think it did both, but I also suspect it slowed me down by raising my temperature.

At one point I got a very high honor. Glenda asked, on her husband Dennis's behalf, for the recipe to my fortified oatmeal. Dennis and I share a birthday, but in five weeks, when I turn sixty, Dennis will be turning eighty two! I don't know what specifically I do that helps me recover quickly; I just know there are a lot of things I do regularly that I think / hope help me recover, and fortified oatmeal is absolutely my primary recovery food.

Forever Young is named after Charlie Young. Charlie ran without a shirt, even in "cold" weather. I also often run without a shirt, even in "cold" weather and for that reason, an not as a tribute, per-se, I was shirtless pre-race and during the race.

The Race

Not much to say. In general, we spread out fairly quickly and reached our own speeds, so there wasn't much passing or being passed. There was, however, one gentleman who looked like he might be in his fifties that I had my eye on. I tried to stay ahead of him in the beginning, but decided to let him get ahead of me fairly early on because I didn't want to blow up. About two thirds of the way into the race, I passed him and by the time I was running the long downhill toward the finish line, he was nowhere to be seen. Gene, however, was also nowhere to be seen, although he was ahead of me.

Post Race

I had my cooler, some clothes to change into and a chair waiting for me in the shade, so I opened my chair and drank a beer before digging into my oatmeal and rice milk.

Remember this year's 3:45 Duke City Marathon pacer, Andrew Peloquin? He took fifth at Forever Young. Unfortunately, I did not recognize him, so I didn't get a chance to chat with him.

I did, however, get a chance to chat with Gene, but it was only after I was back home and looking at Strava that I realized the Gene I had been talking to was Gene Kersh. Gene has been doing the Mt. Taylor Winter Quadrathlon for years and always finishes long before I do (e.g., in 2015, he finished in 5:36:05 and I finished almost an hour later in 6:32:20). Gene has run the La Luz Trail Run in under two hours in his fifties. I've chatted with him before, so it's embarrassing that even after he told me his first name, I didn't put two and two together.

There were no vegan burritos available, but there were vegetarian ones with green chile. They were served as halves, so I had three. I also had a few vegetarian, but not vegan, chocolate chip cookies. I offered to help with the tear-down, but they had plenty of hands, so I headed home.

Historical

Forever Young is one of the three "entry fee required" races hosted by the Albuquerque Road Runners. ARR also hosts "Perky's Burque Brewery Tour and the Fun Run Freeforall series.

Forever Young:

​​This race is a celebration in memory of our member Charlie Young, an avid runner, cyclist and outdoorsman, who was killed in a bike accident in Colorado in August 2004.

Pre-covid, Forever Young was held in April. It was canceled in 2020. In 2021 and 2022 it was held in October.

Javelina Jundred 2022

Overview

Yeah, I ran it. I haven't made time to write up a race report yet. I do have notes, so with luck I won't leave out anything important. Oh wait, none of this is important!

Deadman Peaks 106 miler 2022

Overview

It was chilly in temperature, but warm in atmosphere or perhaps that was the two Santa Fe Brewing 7k IPAs and the shot of Dewar's Whisky that I had at the halfway point.

I got 'er done, but chose not write up a race report until after I've written up my JJ100 adventure. And that's the downside to running a hundred miler six days after finishing a hundred miler: no time to write race reports.

My official time was 32:49:00 finishing seventh of the nine finishers, another thirteen started but did not finish and six did not start.

Oh, and this happened.

White Mesa Fat Ass 50k 2022

Overview

Initially, my goal for this race was to keep it alive. That morphed into getting John Dahl across the finish line after he asked me for some information about New Mexico trail running. WMFA50k was to be his first ultra.

He succeeded. I ran all but the last quarter mile with him. He finished in 8:47:01

History

The White Mesa Fat Ass 50k was created by James Breyfogle. It was the first of the four free ultras that composed the Albuquerque Fat Ass Series. After Jim left Albuquerque (in 2013 or 2014), Perky Garcia became the race director. It continued to be held annually for many years although it never had a lot of participants. In 2016 there were 9 finishers of the entire 50k, but by 2017 it was down to 4 and in 2018 only 2.

In 2019, with Perky's encouragement, RaceNM put on the Dragon's Back Ultra and Trail Races on the same course, but in June (when it's HOT!) and for the next few years, although some people came out to run one, two, three or four laps of the course in November, the event had been demoted to a Dragon's Back training run and was no longer an official part of the Albuquerque Fat Ass Series.

At the end of the 2021 Fat Ass Series season, I put the White Mesa Fat Ass 50k back into the series for 2022, figuring that by November of 2022, I'd free up some time to drum up some interest. But time passed and I found no such time. Instead I got further and further behind in other things, so November 12th rolled around without any mass email having been sent and on top of that, a new race, the Socorro Souls of Sorrow, was scheduled for the same day.

Attendance

I really thought it would just be John and I. In addition to not sending out any email reminder, I only updated the White Mesa Fat Ass web page two days prior to the run. I was surprised, but heartened, to see Roger Squires in the parking lot. Then Dan Clark pulled up. Wow, that's already double my expectations. Just before the 8am "official" start came around (Roger started a 7:30), Miranda identified herself as a friend of Spencer and mentioned that Spencer was on her way.

Dan and Miranda chose to do two laps. Roger, Spencer, John and I did all four. A seventh, Steve, chose to do one lap.

Weather

According to my truck thermometer, it was 22F shortly before the start and 40F as we were driving back home about a half hour after the finish. My guess is the high was around 50F. There was less wind this year than I ever remember.

I typically run with less clothing than most people for any given temperature, in part because I want to run faster and I increase my speed to warm up. However, since I knew I'd be running the first lap with John, I started out wearing a shirt, arm sleeves, fleece hat, with mitten glove shells over wool gloves, with a hand warmer in each hand. I also wore my ultravest and had some emergency gear in it.

A quarter through the first lap, I ditched the arm sleeves, hat, shells and gloves, stashing them in my ultravest and then just holding a hand warmer in each hand. After the first lap, I knew I'd be running the remaining laps with John. There was enough sunshine, however, for me to ditch my shirt, ultravest and hand warmers and switch to a single 20 oz. handheld.

Fuel

I ate some oatmeal and bread in Albuquerque, before picking up John. I also took 200mg of ibuprofen because I've had a mild hot-spot on my right foot.

Before the first lap and second lap, I drank a double espresso. I had brought enough that I could do that before the third and fourth laps, but although John is a faster runner than I am, his body is not yet used to longer distances, so instead of espresso before the final two laps, I had beer. Specifically, I had a Prairie Artisan Bourbon Barrel aged Weekend before our third lap and a Boulevard Sixth Glass before our final lap.

For the first lap I added two 200 calorie, 70mg caffeine packets of Tailwind to 17 ounces of water in the tube for my ultravest. I did the same thing for the second lap, except I used 20 ounces of water in my handheld.

In addition to the 800 calories I got from the Tailwind, I consumed a bunch of gels. I did not pay attention to how many, but my guess is somewhere between ten and fifteen. As far as I can remember, other than a handful of Ruffles potato chips I begged off Spencer, my only other source of calories were a bunch of little Jolly Rancher hard candies.

The Tailwind and Jolly Ranchers were both leftover from the Bataan Memorial Death March Substitute I hosted back in 2020. My rationale for eating what I did was that I wasn't really trying to go particularly quickly, so it made a lot more sense to go cheaply. The gels also were leftovers from various races where I've grabbed a handful of "emergency gels" at an aid station, then never had an emergency.

Minutiae

I only led our tiny pack off course once, on the third loop (after that strong beer), when I thought it was time to head east back to the car a little earlier than we should have. Oops.

I never stumbled hard enough to hit the ground, not even my hands.

It was a beautiful day, and I made sure to take Dan and John slightly off course to see the big hole in the ground with the ten foot drop into water. Nobody fell—nor was anybody pushed—in. Perhaps if everyone knew that I would talk incessantly for the remainder of the course, I would have been.

With seven people attending with my poor planning and poor execution, I decided to do a better job in 2023 and I've already updated the web page to document the 2023 date (November 11th—Veteran's Day).

Ed Thanksgiving's Group Run

Ed Thanksgiving runs a trail half marathon every year on Thanksgiving. I found out about it in 2021 via Strava. Although Ed and I are essentially the same age, he's a faster runner than I am, so it's a bit intimidating to run with him.

After his run, people hang out and eat a little and have a beer. As such, the invitation asks people to finish their run at a particular time, meaning the slower runners need to start earlier. Last year I started earlier, but this year I (foolishly?) decided to run with the main group. I figured they can't all be as fast as Ed, and I was right. Sort of.

What the fast people would do is run at a pace that most of us couldn't maintain then get to some juncture where the navigationally challenged might need assistance, and wait. That was sufficient to keep me motivated to run quicker than I'd normally run. It also meant that my fear of getting too cold due to having to run at someone else's pace was completely unfounded. As such, as I was able to shed all my layers until I was just wearing my shorts, shoes and an ultra-vest with my shirt, hat and arm sleeves tucked inside.

In my Strava entry I noted:

I blowed up! Repeatedly. Part of it had to do with me being ridiculously overdressed at the start. […]

We got back to Jim's and had excellent conversation and beer.

I am very thankful for my running (and non-running) friends.

Whee!

Whee indeed. Thank you, Ed!

Black Friday Turkey Trots 2022

November 25th, 2022

This is a four mile race I actually run quickly, for better or worse. It's held the day after Thanksgiving and—in theory—by forcing myself to race it, I cultivate restraint in my eating and drinking the day before. In reality, for the last two years I've done a challenging half marathon the day before and lacked self-discipline the rest of the day.

Neither Ken Gordon nor James DuPlain were present, but there was a new participant, Piggy Style, who looked fast. Sure enough, I pulled away from everyone except Piggy Style, who casually asked

| Mind if I run with you?

I was happy to have the company, but I immediately knew that I was destined for second place.

When I learned that Piggy Style had moved to Albuquerque recently, I let him know a bit about the local running scene. We stayed together until the turnaround. By that point, he had seen the entire course so I encouraged him to run his pace, not mine, and off he went.

My official time was 30:27.6, a bit slower than 2021 (28:50.7). My fastest was in 2018 (28:20.2).

Bosque Bigfoot 50k 2022

November 26th, 2022

My plan was to put my iPod touch on shuffle and run at whatever pace seemed appropriate for whatever tune was playing, at least after I ran fast enough to warm up.

The temperature was about freezing when we started. I chose to not wear a shirt so that I would spend less time futzing with my clothing than I had done a couple days earlier on Ed Thanksgiving's half-marathon.

I ran my first mile in 8:37 and my second in 8:36, then I settled into about a ten minute mile pace for the next few miles, finishing my first lap in an hour twenty minutes, with my heart-rate nice and low. In theory, I could maintain that pace for the rest of the race, but the hot-spot that I developed at Deadman Peaks returned.

All told I took 600mg of ibuprofen and had a double espresso before each of the eight mile loops, but I wound up stopping and cleaning my feet at least three times and did a lot of walking. My official time was 7:04:19, and although nobody my age or older finished before I did, two fifty-eight year olds (a man and a woman) certainly did.

This was my sixth time running this race, all but one of those were held the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The exception was held on February 13th, 2021 instead of the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2020, due to covid-19. This was the first time it took me more than seven hours to finish. In 2018, I finished in 4:59:29, although I hadn't run a tough half marathon two days prior.

Tucson Marathon 2022

Overview

I ran the Tucson Marathon 2022 in 3:27:22, twenty-two minutes and thirty-eight seconds faster than I needed to qualify for the Boston Marathon in 2024. I was second in my age group (male 60-64), having been beaten by a very fast 61 year old. He and a 65 year old man were the only two people my age or older who finished before I did.

I did not fall, but I started with a slightly injured left knee and finished with a slightly more injured left knee.

Background

I ran the Tucson Marathon in 2017 as my first Boston qualifier. I was quick enough that I got to run the Boston Marathon in 2019. I've qualified for Boston since then, but at the Big Cottonwood Marathon, which is a faster course and is also in my "fun around" training block.

I chose to run Tucson instead of Big Cottonwood for a few reasons:

• My advisor from grad school had moved to Tucson and I was looking forward to seeing him
• Tucson is also close to Gold Canyon, which meant I could visit Jeanne, my late dad's wife
• Aravaipa took over the race, and I like Aravaipa
• Attempting a BQ early in the year leaves room for a do-over
• A chance to do well in my new age group
• I'm not very smart (Tucson is during my Bataan Memorial Death March training block)

Jeanne wound up having "minor" heart surgery done on the Wednesday before the race. So, I drove out to her house in Gold Canyon on Tuesday, stayed with her during her operation, then hung out with her Thursday and Friday. So, although I didn't get a chance to visit my advisor, I did get the honor of being able to help Jeanne at a difficult time.

Race Day

Pre-Race

I got up at 3:10am, drank a strong coffee, got out the door at 3:30 and drove to Tucson, arriving just before 5. I ate two bagels and took two 200mg ibuprofen tablets. I was using the ibuprofen because I had a little trouble with my left knee and a hot-spot on my right foot.

I got out my turquoise waistband and put my iPod touch in one of its two compartments and a quad espresso in the other. Then I added six gels on the side with the iPod touch and four on the side with the double espresso and zipped it up. The zipper separated on both sides! Uh oh. I took five of the gels out, crossed my fingers and tried again. The zippers remained intact, so I put the five gels in my bag and planned on starting the race with three in one hand and two in the other.

Before too long I got on the bus to the start. Tucson is a point-to-point marathon that requires participants to be bused to the start. I chatted a little with some of the other runners, got off, found another runner to chat with, had a productive porta-potty stop, found the 3:20 pace group leader and hung out. I remembered to open my hand warmers, but completely forgot about the extra gels. In fact, I hadn't even brought them with me; they were back in my truck.

Race

The race itself was uneventful. I listened to my Bataan Memorial Death March playlist. It's all quick tunes, four Me First and the Gimme Gimmes albums¹ (with the "slow" songs expurgated) with my "Speed 3" playlist² in between each album.

As I ran, I had to figure out when to take my consumables: two 200mg ibuprofen tablets, the five Chocolate Outrage Gu gels and my quad espresso. I had half my quad espresso (i.e. a double espresso) at mile 9. I think I had two gels at about mile 10. I took all 400mg of ibuprofen at mile 11. At mile 18 I had another gel and the final half of my quad espresso. I had my final gel at mile 23.

Although the Tucson Marathon has been held since 1969, this was the first year Aravaipa was running it. It was a kick to see Jamil Coury, this year's race director, announcing the start. Furthermore, Jubilee Paige was at the half way point taking pictures. In the best of circumstances I'm a horrible conversationalist, but sleep deprived and focused on not tripping, I blurted out:

"Wow! You're a photographer too, and you sing so pretty."

Mentally, I'm mostly used to seeing Jubilee at the Javelina Jundred where she's the race director and greets the finishers. Since that's the most recent time I saw her, I associated seeing her with being done, yet I still had the harder half of the Tucson Marathon to finish. Eventually though, I remembered seeing her at the top of Mingus Mountain during the Cocodona 250. She was not only crewing the aid station, she had made a scrumptious vegan pasta meal. So, yeah, stupid brain of mine should realize she's everywhere, not just at the finish.

As I approached each aid station, I shouted:

"I'd like two waters, please!"

I'd then try to grab both cups as I ran, drinking as much as I wanted and pouring the rest over my head.

I believe I would have run a bit faster toward the end if I had consumed more calories during the race. There were aid stations with marathon-type food (but no gels), but the volunteers weren't holding the food out in front, so I forgot which stations would have food, so I had none, I chose not to drink Gatorade because I was more nervous of it perhaps upsetting my stomach than running low on calories.

Post-Race

When I picked up my bib, I was told that the race shirts would be at the finish line, but I forgot to ask about them at the finish line, so I have no shirt from the race, which is OK for me, because I have too many shirts, but it is disappointing that shirts were handled that way. By the time I finished, there were many other things I was thinking about than to remember to ask for a shirt³.

I hung out long enough to pick up the slate coaster I won for being second in my age group, then hopped a bus back to the parking lot at the start. Or at least that's what I thought I did. I didn't think about the fact that many people had come from a hotel, until the bus was clearly heading there. Uh oh! Was I on the wrong bus? I was certainly tired enough to have gotten on a wrong bus, but the driver was happy to take me and a few others back to the start. I don't know if we were on the wrong bus or if that's just the way it was supposed to work.

My drive back to Gold Canyon was uneventful, but it was a bit slow, because some of the route back was on the marathon course itself, so cars had one fewer lane than normal since one lane was blocked off for the runners, who were still making their way down the course.

Although I didn't get to see my advisor, I did get back to Jeanne in time for both of us to watch the Army Navy football game. My daughter Margaret earned an Army ROTC scholarship and is a freshman at the University of New Mexico (where I went to grad school). My other daughter is a senior in high school with an application pending to attend West Point⁴. So, all three of us were rooting for Army and I was texting my daughters during the exciting game. I may not have beaten the old people, but Army beat Navy. It was a very good day.

Grinch Lunch

The Grinch Lunch is the second stop on the Burque Brew Tour. This year, however, I chose not to drink any alcohol from November 28th, 2022 (the day after I turned sixty) until June 25th, the day I assume I'll finish Western States. So, I raced and socialized but didn't drink.

Similar to the Black Friday Turkey Trots, Piggy Style ran with me initially, barely breaking a sweat while I pushed fairly hard. Once again, I knew I was beat and so I ran fast enough to clinch second, but not painfully fast.

The weather was excellent, so people gathered together outside to relax in the sunny final day of the year. I got to catch up a bit with several of the Albuquerque Road Runners. I also had a chance to plug the upcoming Foothills Fat Ass runs and chat a little with the founders of that tradition.

My official time was 22:28.7.

2023

On Saturday, December 23rd, I raced the Grinch Lunch as my last event of the year. I have yet to convert this page from "what I plan to do in 2023" to "what I did in 2023", nor have I created my 2024 calendar, but I'll do that eventually (maybe).

As of Sunday, December 24th, Strava shows I've run 2,387.6 miles in 561 hours fifty-one minutes, climbing 252,028 feet. If I remember, I'll update those numbers before the new year ticks over.

Financially, 2023 was a tough year, and that translated into me having much less time to write race reports, so although I completed almost everything I had planned for the year, I wrote up very little of it.

Three training blocks

For the last several years, I've had three distinct training blocks per year.

1. Bataan Memorial Death March
2. Hardrock (or qualifier)
3. Fun Around¹

During my serious training block for the Bataan Memorial Death March (BMDM) I have relatively few events. I do my ruck training two and a half days a week. I had planned on trying to participate in the Tough Ruck in 2023, but I nursed a hot-spot in my right foot during my BMDM training and chose to aim for Tough Ruck 2024 instead.

On March 19th, I finished the Bataan Memorial Death March.

My next block leads up to Hardrock (the next time I get in) or a qualifier or two in the years I don't get in. This year, I did not get in to Hardrock, although I did get in to Western States. I had won the Bigfoot 200 lottery, but had to defer to 2024 since it conflicted with Acceptance Day. Because I had signed up for the Bigfoot 200 (and because my finances are still tricky) I didn't attempt the Grand Slam. Now that Western States is over (I finished it, which was my goal), I'm back to a "fun around" block.

During my fun around block I typically "participate" (i.e., try to finish) in a lot of events, but actually "race" (i.e., try to win or at least run quickly for my age) in very few. This year, however, since my foot is still giving me trouble, my highest priority will be rehabilitating my foot, which may mean a lot of unicycling instead of running.

Unfortunately, life has gotten in the way of writing up race reports, so, as of late October 2023, although I have finished almost everything I had planned for the year, I have written very little. For some events I have notes and I hope to go back and write them up.

My fun around block ends in mid November, when I once again start my hardcore training for BMDM.

Events I'd Like to Enter

Here's what I have run in 2023 and what I'd like to run in the remainder of the year.

I currently plan to race Javelina Jundred, in that I'd like to try for a finish in under twenty hours. I've started 2023 in a semi injured state, so that seems overly ambitious, but historically I've healed well, so that's still my plan. JJ100 is still a long way away. Besides, if I make all my goals, I'm not setting them high enough.

Although I've included the Tucson Marathon in my 2023 plans, my running it in 2022 adversely affected my training for the Bataan Memorial Death March, but there were complicating factors (Jeanne's surgery, my right foot's hot-spot). In principle, I like qualifying for Boston early, but of all the events on this list, the Tucson Marathon is the one that will require extended scrutiny as it gets closer.

The R column is only checked when I plan to run very hard (e.g., to win or to try to do well for my age). Racing is annoyingly hard and lazy is my middle name.

Foothills Fat Ass

Overview

Perky and Prince Charming came up with the idea of a New Year's Day Fat Ass Run and implemented it on 2012. They were so successful that they were cursed blessed to host it … forever (or through 2022, whichever came first). If you've ever watched Victor Wooten play Amazing Grace, you may have decided to give up on playing the bass. He's that good.

And so the Foothills Fat Ass was never to be hosted again, except, well although it's inconceivably intimidating to try to fill their shoes, I do have big feet¹, and "not too smart" would be my middle name, except it's three words. Additionally, I have plenty of free time, since I'm not wasting any by trying to learn how to play the bass. So…

I kept the tradition alive by hosting it this year. I also ran "sweep".

As Race Director

What Worked

Three and a half awesome volunteers: Jason Romero, Mark Werkmeister, Roleen Younis and my wife. They did all the hard work. Jason and Mark manned the aid station. Roleen womanned the 50k start/finish. My wife, Sophia, made the black-eyed pea salsa that is guaranteed to bring people good luck (not necessariy the people who ate it or even attended, but somewhere, somebody will have good luck in 2023, at least momentarily). She gets full marks for her cooking, but she was dragooned.

Much of the aid station food and beverages worked, and I've been keeping track, although via poory indexed email, so I'll elaborate later.

The starting time of 8am was perfect, except for the tardy couple.

The participants worked. They showed up and feigned happiness and cheer.

Using the Matthews house worked in that it was better than nothing.

What Didn't Work

Hiring an ambulance to stay just out of sight of the house, in case someone got injured playing air-hockey was overkill. I won't do that again.

Having two separate start times and locations short-changed the shorter distance participants.

Using the Matthews house forced the 50k participants to run on roads for about a third of the course. It also meant that there was no food or beverages awaiting the finishers of the shorter distances.

I may have been the only one to eat the pecan pie.

The open course for the 50k didn't work, since one of the 50k participants wound up not running the southern most loop.

Plans for Next Year

have begun.

We're investigating moving the start and finish area to a location closer to the foothills.

We'll come up with a better way of keeping people informed about the race. One possibility is using Facebook. That would be better than only updating the web page. There are other alternatives though.

If we have a better way of communicating with the participants, having an open unmarked course might work. Not marking the course has several advantages, including no setup or teardown time and not having to worry about people removing (or relocating) the markings.

We'll line up volunteers much earlier, and encourage the volunteers from 2023 to revert to being participants in 2024.

As Entrant

What Worked

I didn't get lost.

Although I stumbled many times, both my knees and both my hands never touched the ground.

The cactus spines didn't poke far enough into my shoes to pierce my feet.

Jolly Rancher hard candies.

What Didn't Work

Too much time chatting with the aid station volunteers cost me my seven hour goal.

Plans for Next Year

To finish under seven hours, duh!

Sandia Snowshoe Race

Overview

I was the first person sixty years or older to finish. That meant I won the male 60-69 age group <cough>tallest midget</cough> award. I chose a nice chair from REI as my prize. Thanks!

I finished 9th overall in 37:50:12. I forgot to turn my GPS watch off after crossing the finish line, but I used Strava's cropping function to come up with a GPX track that's close enough..

The Race

I ran, blew up, walked, ran, walked, ran, walked, took my polypro jacket off, ran some more and eventually finished.

If I hadn't worn my jacket, and had I brought a handheld and my iPod touch, I could have shaved a minute or two off my finish time and perhaps gaining a rank or two. IOW, I was a big baby once again this year, although I don't think I would've beaten Andy and I know I couldn't have beaten Brett.

Aftermath

I drove home earlier than I normally do, because I was nervous about the conga line down the mountain in general and my truck's broken windshield defroster in specific.

I saw three cars stuck in snow with various people trying to help get the cars out. I'd stop and help, but the snow shovel that I kept in my truck for years was stolen a while back and I haven't had the money to get a replacement. Additionally, I kind of had to pee real badly¹.

Thank You

Thank you, Friends of the Sandia Mountains. This is an excellent race and next year I'll run the entire thing. Honest! Maybe!

Background

Only half-jokingly, I call this the toughest race I do each year. I stole that from my brother-in-law, but it's definitely true when toughest takes into consideration both the intensity of the effort and just how slowly and pitifully I move with that effort.

The course has changed over the years. This year was a new course, although it may have been the same course as last year. I didn't get a good GPX track last year and my memory is not good enough to know. My brother-in-law and sister both did the course last year, but not this year. Regardless, the general pattern is hat it starts out downhill, then has some rollers, then finishes going uphill.

Each year, in theory, I plan to push myself hard, but something comes up and I half-ass it. This year I was healthy and basically injury free (I have a hot-spot on my right foot, but it never spoke up during the race), but it was surprisingly cold. I pulled into the parking lot at about 9:10 and it was six degrees Fahrenheit. I don't remember it ever having been that cold and I've done this race every year it's been held since at least 2012 and probably a few years prior to that.

After I had drunk my pre-race quad espresso, they announced that the start would be delayed a half hour. It was taking longer than expected for people to make it to the top, because the roads were dicey.

On the drive up, just above the Ski Area Parking there was a sign that said "Chains required beyond this point". I didn't have chains, nor did anyone else I saw. I did have four wheel drive, but to be honest, I hadn't tested it since I had a new transfer case (and drive train) installed back in September.

During the thirty minute hold, I texted my wife, sister and brother-in-law. I started with a picture of my car's thermometer reading 6F. I then mentioned some of my concerns about the ride down. I idled my truck and turned the heater on, but that meant that I could no longer trust the thermometer to tell me the outside temperature. So, by the time to head to the start line again I chose to err on the side of caution and wore far too much clothing: a long-sleeve T-shirt, arm-bands and a polypro jacket on my chest, running shorts and my lightest tights on my legs.

Resolutions Stink!

"Resolutions Stink!" is the third stop on the Burque Brew Tour. This year, however, I chose not to drink any alcohol from November 28th, 2022 (the day after I turned sixty) until June 25th, the day I assume I'll finish Western States. So, I raced and socialized but didn't drink.

Pre-race I had a chance to chat with Gene Kersh, a runner I mostly know from seeing his name way before mine on various results pages. He's a few years older than I, so sometimes we're in the same age group, sometimes he's in a more advanced group. Although I've seen Gene's results "forever," I only recently started chatting with him pre and post race. Turns out he's a fellow deadhead. We are everywhere.

Similar to the Black Friday Turkey Trots and the Grinch Lunch, Piggy Style ran with me us initially, barely breaking a sweat while Gene and I pushed fairly hard. Yup, Gene was tagging along, or so I thought. Turns out he was innit to winnit. I did pull ahead of both of them very briefly when running the downhills in the first half, but Gene and Piggy Style more than made up for it on the corresponding uphills. After the turnaround I never caught up with them again, but I had a nice view.

Once again, I knew I was beat and so I ran fast enough to remain in third, but I didn't run painfully¹ fast. Piggy Style pipped Gene at the end.

I had actually meant to bring my iPod touch and listen to my Speed 3 playlist. If I had, I suspect I'd have run a little faster, but I don't think I could have caught either. Gene took second overall in a local (ostensibly²) 5k earlier this year.

The weather was excellent, so people gathered together outside to relax and drink beer. I got to catch up a bit with several of the Albuquerque Road Runners, including meeting Doug, a runner who is older than I and younger than Gene. I also got to meet Gene's wife, Ellen.

My official time was 30:06.7.

Epilogue

I had a great time at Resolutions Stink!, but I'm not sure that racing four miles with a hot-spot that's probably Morton's neuroma the day before my hardest training run of the year was a good idea. OTOH, this cements my picture in the urban dictionary next to the phrase "boy ain't right."

Mt. Taylor Winter Quadrathlon

Overview

I didn't "break"¹ any bones or tear any ligaments.

Last year I finished in slightly over seven hours, but had a foot injury. This year, I had a different—lesser—foot injury (on a different foot), so I figured I'd finish about a half hour earlier, and I did, in 6:29:46.61.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, I participated in the Albuquerque Road Runners Relay RePlay FREEforALL event the following day, which meant I didn't write a ridiculously long Quad report, at least not when I could still remember everything.

Friday, i.e., check-in day

My son's car died in Moriarty. It's to be towed to a scrapyard in Albuquerque and instead of driving to Grants early, I'm hanging back, in case he needs a ride. Am I spending my time reviewing my drop bags, since I won't have extra time to do so at the motel? Nope. I'm too busy frittering and wasting the hours in an offhand way.

Uneventful drive. A line of people waiting to check-in to the motel, so I get back in my truck and drive over to check-in at The Quad packet pickup and gear drop. There's Ken. The good news is he's getting out and skiing a bunch. The bad news is he's no longer running. That's very rough, but, as always, he's upbeat.

Dustin, Julie, Barry and Dan

In stroll Dustin and Julie. I don't introduce them to Ken, because I'm socially inept. Oh, and I also assume they know each other, because they're all such great race directors and I imagine great race directors communicate via telepathy. I'll never know.

I think I ran into Barry then, too. I certainly saw Barry before the start of the race. I ran into (and couldn't remember his name) Dan Clark during gear drop-off, too.

Saturday, i.e., race day

Is it Tom?

No. Mike.

I do this every year, don't I?

Yup.

Sure enough, I've parked in the same spot three years in a row and Michael Mills has been right next to me. He used to be (and perhaps still is) on Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council (AMRC), the Search-And-Rescue (SAR) team that literally does the heavy lifting nearby. I spent ten years as a member of Cibola Search and Rescue and was on a few missions with Mike back in the day, but still I got his name wrong…three years in a row.

A little while later, Leigh said hi. She too was (and may still be) on AMRC.

Bike Up

Uneventful, but sufficiently long to give me a chance to appreciate the fact that I hadn't ridden my bike since September and that even when I do ride my bike, I studiously avoid riding uphill, because it sucks to do so because I have no experience doing so.

Run Up

I remembered to take my helmet off. I also took off my bike jersey. WTF? Where is that shirt I "remembered" putting in my drop-bag? I must have put it in the other (bike -> run transition) drop bag.

I see Adam and he lets me know that he's not feeling it this year. At the time, I didn't realize just how regularly he does this event. But now, I've scraped the results from 2010 on and see that during that time he's finished it ten times. Anyway, I cheer him on with Mitch Hedberg's joke "I used to take drugs. I still do, but I used to." There's a lot of truth in that little joke. I wouldn't have been quite so cheery, were it not for the ibuprofen, acetaminophen and caffeine dulling the discomfort of my right foot hot-spot.

Ski Up

Nope. No shirt there, either.

Nobody took my poles, although to be fair, I've done The Quad more than ten times and that only happened once.

This year, I finally learned how to put my boots on properly. It's not that I think you can teach an old dog new tricks; I think even an old dog eventually gets tired of the massive discomfort associated with putting his boots on incorrectly. Luckily, one of (I have at least two) my friends whose nickname is KK, shared a YouTube video that helped me greatly. I'd share it with you, but I can't find it. It's not "Ski Boots - How to put them on" or even "How to Properly Put on Your Ski Boots". Oh well, you probably aren't even reading by now and if you are, you probably know how to put your ski boots on.

Snowshoe Up and Down

I drank a lot of beer on November 27th, 2022, when I turned sixty. No, I'm not going to claim that I was still drunk and that's why my snowshoe time was so poor. I'm actually pretty happy with my snowshoe time. It's just that on November 28th, I decided to not drink for a while and when I got into Western States, I decided for a while means until June 25th, which means… I did The Quad sober.

So, when I got to the edge of the universe and saw the shots lined up, I promptly took one and poured it over my head. I gave up (or at least put on hold) drinking alcohol, but said nothing about wearing it. Good thing it wasn't cold up there, because I was still shirtless and alcohol evaporates quicker than water, which leads to increased evaporative cooling.

Ski Down

Good thing that I had a fleece hat and Javelina Jundred arm-warmers, because skiing down is a little chilly, since the little heaters in my body idle when I'm not moving my legs.

If I ever want to get a decent time at this event, I'm going to have to learn how to deal with the uphill portions of the ski down. Watching inch-worms speed past me is annoying.

Run Down

I definitely had the runner's high going on. I was listening to my iPod library on random per-song shuffle. I remember hearing So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star followed by a song that seemed sublime, but I was high. I think it was something discordant, like Captain Beefheart or The Residents, but I didn't write it down and I certainly don't remember it weeks later. Oh well, this paragraph is only filler. How much can one say about an uneventful five mile downhill run?

Bike Down

There was a minor headwind, which my masculinity appreciates. One year we (meaning the mid-packers) had a tailwind on the bike down. That was scary. According to Strava, my max speed this year was 43.8 miles per hour. It kills me to use the brake on my bike in a race, and I didn't need to, but the year we had a tailwind, I did.

Dustin, Julie, Barry and Mike

Looking at the results, I see that Dustin and Julie (both 5:45:18) came in less than two minutes after Mike (5:43:19) and managed to pip Barry (5:45:23) by five seconds. Dang. That would have been cool to see, but I've never finished The Quad that quickly and probably never will.

Skiing shirtless was an accident.

I hadn't even planned on running shirtless.

I had intended to pack my purple JJ100 short-sleeve shirt in my bike/run transition bag. However, with the distraction of Elvis's issue, I wound up not packing a short-sleeve shirt in either of my drop bags, but I thought I had.

I wound up getting to Grants later than I had planned and by the time I got my bib, dropped off all my gear and checked in at the hotel, it was time to play poker, so I did that rather than review my gear. I didn't think I needed to review my gear because this was my twelfth and each year I copy my gear list from the previous year and only make a few changes based on weather.

So, on race day, when I got off my bike, I took off my long sleeve shirt and was going to put my short sleeve shirt on, then I saw there wasn't one. I could have just worn my short-sleeve bike jersey, but I thought I must have accidentally put my short-sleeve shirt in my other drop bag. I figured I could just run to the ski transition and put it on there, but ... it wasn't there, either, nor was it in my snowshoe backpack.

Although it was clearly one more instance of me mismanaging my time, part of the problem is that about a week out I thought it was going to be colder this year than last year, but it turned out to be significantly warmer. I have four different pair of tights/leggings and I only packed my heaviest ones. That was a mistake, so of course I was overheated by the time I got off my bike.

No Free Beer

After the race I was telling people that there was free beer, and since I'm not drinking, they could have mine. Only there wasn't free beer. I'm pretty sure they've done that in the past, but I'm not sure they even had it last year. I can't remember, have I mentioned that my memory is bad?

V Day

V Day Run is the fourth run of the Burque Brewery Tour.

Overcast, not particularly windy, warm for me. The course was new, but I had been to the Hops Brewery previously with Team RWB after an invigorating group bike ride.

My big concern was my foot.

Last month, I pushed my Saturday long run to Sunday, so I could race "Resolutions Stink!". For this V Day Run, I chose to do my long "run" the day before. So, the day prior I "ran" twenty-four miles with a forty-one pound pack. It did not go well, and I wound up taking my shoe and sock off a few times.

With my sock off, I noticed a speck in the center of my hot-spot that could have been the tip of a goat's head or perhaps it was simply dried blood where a goat's head had merely stabbed me. My eyes are bad enough that it could have been anything.

After finishing my long "run", I used my wife's X-Acto knife and removed what appeared to be (bad eyesight caveat) some sort of splinter. Yes, my foot bled a little. No, I didn't need stitches. It did leave my foot a little tender, but I knew that the following day I'd have the V Day race and would get a chance to test my handiwork.

I ran fine. My official time was 23:08.

Running with a shirt was an accident.

I had intended to doff my crop-top before the race, but I was too busy yacking at people.

Free Beer

I gave my free beer coupon to the Muirheads, whom I've used my scruffy appearance to scam pity beers from at both the Black Friday Turkey Trots and the Grinch Lunch earlier in the season. I kept the penguin.

King of the Hill

Overview

I finished in 1:02:35 for first overall in the 10k ruck. There were only four other ruckers this year and the notable absence was my buddy GEORGE¹ who absolutely crushed me last year. Without GEORGE there to keep me honest, I finished four seconds slower than last year.

Overshadowed

With Shenanigains going on back up in Albuquerque and with the Bataan Memorial Death March only eight days away, I did not write a race report, yet.

The day before KotH, I visited a local podiatrist. After we agreed that my hot-spot symptoms were consistent with a morton's neuroma and definitely weren't a stress fracture, he gave me a cortisone shot². The race wasn't long enough to determine whether that helped appreciably, but it definitely didn't hurt.

Other than that, I don't think there's too much to say about my race at KotH. However, in addition to the 10k Ruck, there were other races and so there were lots of participants. I hope to come back and fill in a few stories, including how I conspired with Piggy Style to claim that I paid him $20,000 to leave the country during the final race of the Albuquerque Brewery Tour so that I would win the crown.

Shenanigains

Overview

I made six ascents, which put me at 29th out of 31 participants, but I beat all the people who stayed home. Oh wait, since there was a limit to the number of entrants, my presence kept someone at home¹.

Winners

We were all winners, because Julie and Dustin put on great races. However, my pen-pal Guillermo Canedo did 26 ascents for 13,000 official feet of gain (but his Strava says 14,209). 2022's Feral Hog 50k winner Adam Drozek did 21, pipping all the lazybones who only did 20. Anyone who did 20 or more ascents got this super cool fake rock. That led to a seven way tie for third place.

Labe Kopelov, from Bedford Indiana, was one of the third-placers. He deserves a special mention, because he's sixty-nine years young. However, he doesn't win the furthest traveled (at least according to UltraSignup's City field), since Kevin Stewart is ostensibly from Carmel Maine.

More Later…

Bataan Memorial Death March

I've already created a nascent Bataan section that briefly mentions both the Death March and the Memorial.

Event, March, Race

This "race report" is a bit convoluted due to the Bataan Memorial Death March being a two day event, even though that wasn't obvious from the web site this year.

Saturday is a day of learning, Sunday a day of doing.

Historically, there were many educational activities to participate in on Saturday, however the most powerful was when the veterans of the Bataan Death March would speak and answer questions. Sunday is a march for most, but a race for some¹.

Saturday

Prior to 2023, the last time the Bataan Memorial Death March was held was 2019 and by then although there were other Bataan Death March veterans present, only two actually gave presentations and answered questions: Ben Skardon (RIP) and James Bollich.

As far as I know, Valdemar De Herrera was the only survivor of the Bataan Death March to make it out to the Memorial this year. He was seated at the front row in the "Survivors and Descendants" presentation, but did not directly address the attendees. Valdemar is 103.

Although he didn't make it to BMDM this year, I believe James Bollich is still alive. Beyond him and Valdemar, it's unclear how many other survivors are still alive.

There were three speakers at the "Survivors and Descendants": Margaret Garcia, author of Tell Me Another War Story: The Life of Evans Garcia Courageous Soldier, American Hero, My Dad, Alan Overmier, son of Bill Overmier and a third person whose name I can't recall. Margaret and Alan briefly told stories of their fathers.

Although she didn't tell it in this presentation, Margaret's story of how her father and his fellow POW accomplices killed and cooked a crow is a story that my (now adult) children remember from previous presentations. They substituted the cooked crow for some exotic game-bird delicacy that they were supposed to prepare for their Japanese guards. Although in hell, they ate like kings that one night.

Alan is a fellow Albuquerque Road Runner. His dad, Bill, was captured on Corregidor. As such, Bill didn't have to make the Death March. However, although the Death March itself was gruesome, the prisoner of war camps, hell ships and forced labor camps that followed were much longer and far deadlier events. That's one of the things people who attend the talks learn on Saturdays.

The third presentation was about other memorials, mostly throughout New Mexico to the aftermath of the war in the Philippines.

Before the descendants presentation began, we (my brother-in-law Jeff, my daughter Iris,and I) chatted with some Team RWB members. Team RWB always has a big presence at BMDM and although many have been going to BMDM for years, it was a first for some.

Sunday

Pre-March

There were only three of us at the Motel-6 Telshor: Jeff, Iris and myself. Still, we chose to go in two vehicles, my wife's van and Jeff's parents' car.

Jeff and I got up at 3:20² so we could be driving by 3:50. We were told to be at the gates by 4:30 and even though we didn't get on the highway quite as smoothly as I had anticipated (I had forgotten that everyone would be tired and that we hadn't done this in four years), that's where we were, going through the gates at 4:30.

We hung out in our vehicles a while, but left before too long to hike to the start line (technically, to the porta potties that were only at the start line, none in or near the parking area). We had a buffer so that things could go wrong and we'd still get to the start on time, but I chewed up that buffer by forgetting my handhelds and then losing my car keys.

So, after doing some backtracking and further backtracking we finally made it to the porta potty line. We had enough time to make one visit, then head out to the street where the participants were lined up.

I haven't yet decided how to frame my race report for this event, so for now I'll just state that I am very glad it was held in person this year.

The March

I raced and lost. Jeff had been plagued with cluster headaches in the weeks leading up to BMDM and had been talking about turning left at around mile eight and only doing the fifteen mile Honorary March, but of course he did the full distance.

My twin daughters both completed the full distance. Margaret, an Army cadet at UNM, was part of a five person light ROTC team. Iris, Commanding Officer of La Cueva's JROTC company—still a civilian for a few more months—finished as an individual, also in the light division. I am crazy proud of them, and of Jeff and and of my sister Marcia who stayed home this year.

Post March

After crossing the finish line, my pack weighed 37.5 pounds. The majority of the weight was food, although I had some warm clothing that I took to wear at the start and the pack itself weighs a few pounds. I donated the food (mostly rice, although I think I also had a bag of beans) to the food bank and headed over to the free lunch.

The free lunch is a nice social event. I started at a table of people I didn't know and chatted with the finishers. They had been doing the event for several years and were glad that it was being held in person again. I then noticed Gerry and Christine, a couple of Team RWB Albuquerque friends and joined them.

I had a chance to talk Zachary, the gentleman who beat me. I also had a chance to talk to the person who crushed my spirit. Turns out he didn't have a plate in his backpack, so he wasn't competing in the heavy division. Oops. That'll learn me.

The free lunch comes with a free beer for people old enough. Although I wasn't drinking alcohol that day, I put it in my now almost empty pack, then ran into George and Nora. George had completed the heavy division carrying sixty one pounds and change. We hung out for a while, then they needed to move on, so in a show of solidarity, I donned his ruck to cement in my mind that I'm not worthy. I am, however, stubborn.

After leaving George and Nora (and George's ruck!), I headed backward on course from the finish line, looking for to welcome the other finishers I know. Cowbell guy was out there, so I stopped and got a picture or two with him. I don't remember the exact order of whom I met, but Roleen, Demetria and Lisa were there and a few others. Then came Uncle Jeff.

Want a beer?

Sure!

I hadn't thought all the camera people out there, but sure enough UJ's photo has him crossing the finish line with a craft beer in his hand. Sweet.

Next it was out to greet Iris. By then I had taken my shirt off and put it in my pack. My pack has a small metal rod that causes it to keep its shape even when it is almost entirely empty. So sure enough, Iris's photo has her being chased by shirtless me, with a finisher's medal around my neck and what appears to be a full large pack. Whee!

Not too long after that, Iris and I went to find Margaret. All the members of a team have to cross the finish line within five seconds of each other, so the team moves no faster than the slowest person. That can be frustrating, but Margaret was happy. Yay!

After more socializing at the free lunch, Jeff, Iris and I started walking to our car. It wasn't that far away. Oops. It was that far away. Iris and I plopped down the second Jeff offered to run ahead and pick up the car and get us.

Iris was a hurting unit. This was the first time she had put a marathon distance on her feet. Margaret had previously "run" the Deadman Peaks Trail Marathon, which is actually a tougher course than the BMDM course, so she knew what to expect. Furthermore, since Margaret finished the day with her ROTC group, I couldn't really tell just how beat up she was. Iris, on the other hand, was whipped. I was sure that tomorrow was going to be worse.

Monday

"Tomorrow" (i.e., the Monday after the March), Jeff and I let Iris sleep in while we headed out to Milagro Coffee Y Espresso. Their web site might not be up, and Bernie sold the place, but it's still one of my favorite coffee shops in the world. This was our second or third visit on this trip and once again, Uncle Jeff paid.

Turns out, I was wrong. Iris felt much better after a night's sleep and was disappointed, but understanding, that we hadn't woken her and taken her with us to Milagro.

I drove us back to Albuquerque and tried not to bug her too much.

The Future

I understand the reason for the three year hiatus and I'm sure that's what caused the number of attendants to be about half of the number in 2019. However, I think the organizers did a top notch job with everything except the web-site (which lacked basic information, like the schedule for Saturday). As such, I suspect that next year's event will be larger and for the spirit of service will resume its growth.

I'll be back. Iris will be at USMA. Margaret may go heavy. I suspect Jeff will run the full in 2024 and with luck, Marcia will join us. My guess is 90% of the other people I've mentioned by name will be there too.

If you go, say hi. Maybe I won't wait five weeks to write up my 2024 report and I'll mention you, too.

My Race

Zachary Carnahan Won

Zachary Carnahan won in 4:40:41.221. I finished second in 4:41:03.683, a 22.462 second difference.

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

I could have run faster. I should have run faster and had I known I was as close to my PR (4:39:45.185) as I was, I would have run faster, even without knowing that it would have made the difference between first and second.

I didn't run as fast I could have for three reasons:

• A runner with what looked like a pack with a plate in it passed me with sufficient speed and grace that I figured I was not going to finish first this year with my gimpy foot. As he passed me, I shouted to him "Do you have a plate in there?" and he just smiled. My guess is he didn't actually hear me. He had earbuds in. I did catch up with him during lunch, afterward and nope, no plate.

• I knew that six days after BMDM was going to be the Academy of Pain, a twelve hour timed race that I wanted to run at least fifty miles during. I had run that distance in the same event last year and this year I was on the fence as to whether my foot would hold up well enough to justify signing up for the Cocoona 250 and I figured AoP would be an excellent test. I really wanted to sign up for C250, so I justified not running harder in order to not jeopardize that test.

• Running hard that late in the race is annoyingly uncomfortable. I can do it, but let's face it, I looked for—and found—reasons not to.

At lunch I asked Zachary point blank if I had caught up to him would he have put up a fight and his answer was no. I had passed him going up mineral hill, but he saw my backpack outside a porta-potty and deliberately chose to run as quickly as he could to gain as much of a lead as possible. That was quite successful, because my hubris lead me to believe that I had crushed his spirit and it didn't occur to me that he had passed me during my brief pit stop. The downside to Zachary is that by his own admission he blew up and that's why, had I run faster, he didn't think he'd have been able to put up a fight.

Far too much Race Information

Last Year's Race

"Last year" was 2019, because BMDM hadn't been held in person since then.

I was in the best shape ever and we had perfect weather. Unfortunately, I developed debilitating hip pain that was almost definitely due to my pack breaking. I did not see or hear my pack break, but my pack was definitely broken by the time I picked it up after taking it off and crossing the finish line.

This Year's Training

This year's training did not go well. I started out with a hot-spot in my right foot and training with a pack made it worse. Each training year I do one or two twenty-four mile trainings and, in general, those are good predictors for my performance. However, in 2019 I didn't do as well as predicted, presumably due to the broken pack. This year, I did *much better than predicted, because both of my twenty-four mile trainings were marred by foot pain that wasn't present on race day.

Reconnaissance

I'm a programmer and I had already written some software to scrape race results and to compute the Mt. Taylor Doublers and the Albuquerque Roadrunners Member Race Series scores.

Since 2016, BMDM has had its results and entrants compiled by Its Your Race, so I used my software to scrape the previous results and the 2023 entrants so I could see who was entered who had previously finished in less than six hours.

There were only five:

None of these people had run sub five, and the youngest was 34. Most people during the intervening years had probably lost interest, although the fact that these people had signed up showed they were at least somewhat interested. I didn't think it likely (but I was wrong!) that any of these people would train hard and decrease their time by more than a half hour, which made me think that if I finished sub-five, I'd either come in first or would be beat by someone new. New people usually are surprised by the difficulty of the course.

Drugs

I broke down and saw a podiatrist on March 10th, the day before the King of the Hill Ruck race and only nine days before the Bataan Memorial Death March. I explained what was going on and why I believed it was a morton's neuroma and why we could rule out a stress fracture. He examined my foot, concurred and gave me a shot of cortisone.

Cortisone is a steroid and I believe its use is a World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) violation without a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE). As far a I know, none of the events I participate in are run using WADA rules, so this is an area I know very little about. I did not seek the cortisone to enhance my ability. It's the only steroid I've ever used and it certainly wasn't something I turned to lightly.

In addition to the cortisone, I used caffeine (3 double espressos), 200mg ibuprofen, 500mg acetaminophen and a bar of 90% dark chocolate (contains theobromine) on race day. None of those are (AFAIK) WADA violations, although the ibuprofen and acetaminophen are barred from UTMB.

Pre-Race

Almost every day I have a double espresso at 5:15 to "wake me up" (although I'm typically awake and doing things around 4:45) and to "get me going". I chose not to use wake-up caffeine the morning of BMDM, because I didn't want to need to go to the bathroom when stuck in traffic and because I didn't want the caffeine wearing off too soon.

Unfortunately, I didn't sleep well. Various noises kept me awake. So with less time spent sleeping and with poorer quality of sleep, the lack of caffeine contributed to me forgetting my handhelds, losing my keys and chewing up time.

In years past, there were porta-potties on the way out that could be hit one final time after the gun had started but before crossing the starting timing mat. In 2019 the lack of those porta potties surprised me and interfered with my race. This year, the lack of porta potties near the parking area surprised me. Luckily, I had brought a lug-a-loo and could use that while Iris slept. Oops. the lug-a-loo was in my truck back in Albuquerque. Surprise!

We did make it to the porta potties in time to hit them—once—before heading to our starting positions, but would once be enough? No.

To Mineral Hill

I rushed to get to the runner's section of the starting line. I wanted to be settled by the time the opening ceremony began. I succeeded, but got separated from Iris. We weren't planning on going the same pace, so that was OK.

They fired the starting (big!) gun. I started my playlist and we were off. Before too long we crossed the starting timing mat and were running. The first six miles are basically downhill and I averaged about a 9:20 min/mile pace, getting my heart-rate up to around 150 bpm and holding it there.

I struck up many conversations with fellow runners, typically starting out by asking if they had run the course before. If they hadn't, I explained how it would unfold and more often than not I suggested that they wanted to be careful not to burn out early.

One person mentioned that he knew Ray Pickering, the guy who had started the Bataan Memorial Death March. He said that Ray was there and I let him know that I'd love to meet Ray. That didn't happen, but perhaps some day I'll get that honor.

One person I chatted with recognized me from my picture on the Civilian Individual Heavy Division registration page.

Miles seven and eight are gentle uphills and around mile eight is where participants doing the honorary march turn to the left. The rest of us turn to the right and head up Mineral Hill.

Up Mineral Hill

My goal was to keep my heart rate around 150 bpm going up Mineral Hill. I wasn't sure if could keep it that low without having to walk here and there, but I was much more concerned with not blowing up than I was to artificially force myself to run the entire way up.

I continued chatting with fellow participants, mostly people who were traveling my speed. Since I wasn't always running, that allowed me to chat with some walkers, too. By this time, I only remember seeing one person running with a pack, and he too would walk every now and then. He was ahead of me, but I was gaining.

I asked him if he had done this before and he said he had. That should have been a warning, because it meant he knew what he was doing. I mentioned that I had probably chatted with him in previous years, but my memory is shot, and 2019 was an eternity in the past. Of course that was Zachary. While we were still going up, I passed him. I (incorrectly!) figured my gap would only widen, since I can run the downhill pretty quickly. I didn't see him again until I spotted him at the post event lunch, where I congratulated him and picked his brain.

Down Mineral Hill

According to my Strava Track, the course peaks at mile 13.2. I ran my fifteenth mile in 8:45 and my seventeenth in 10:27, but my sixteenth took me 12:29. I had to use the porta potty. Once pass before the start was not enough. Not only did I lose a couple minutes there, but that's when Zachary passed me. He knew who I was and he also recognized my unique backpack.

I didn't know that Zachary had passed me, but I did see a guy with a small Osprey backpack that looked like it was designed to hold a metal plate, like a small GoRuck pack. I shouted "Do you have a plate in there?" I misinterpreted the smile I got in return and thought that he had. My mind wasn't functioning well the entire day. The cascade of tiredness induced troubles just getting to the starting line left me even further addled. I was actually surprised that Osprey was making a plate carrier, but I figured rucking just must be taking off more than I had realized. I was delusional.

The Sand Pit

I don't remember what year they changed the course, but the sand pit now has some uphill to it. According to Strava, mile twenty-one has 95 feet of gain and mile twenty-two has another 131 feet of gain. I was no longer keeping my heart rate up around 150; it was closer to 140 and I was wearing down. From mile 22.4 to 24.2 is downhill and rather than using that downhill effectively, I used it to rest. It took me 11:08 to run my twenty fourth mile even though it was downhill. I had let me heart-rate drop down to 135. I had given up. I wasn't going to catch Osprey guy, so I had no chance at first and six days later I wanted to run fifty miles (but without a pack!).

The Home Stretch

The twenty-fifth mile was a little up hill and the twenty-sixth a little down. I ran them in 12:37 ad 12:31. My heart wasn't in it in part because my head wasn't in it. Not only was I not thinking straight, but I had never looked at my elapsed time and furthermore, I misremembered my PR as 4:35 or 4:36 and not 4:39. A PR was in my grasp, but I didn't even know it. I spent months training, but not enough time working on a race-day plan.

Second

After finishing, I called my sister Marcia. She's completed the Bataan Memorial Death March (without a pack) and typically comes out to join us. This year, she needed to stay back in Albuquerque. I couldn't get the tracking app to work on my phone, so I didn't know where I had placed. There was a results tent, but it had a sign saying that your results wouldn't be available until about a half hour after you crossed the finish line.

I figured Marcia could use the web to find out how many people had finished ahead of me. My time was roughly 4:40, but Osprey guy probably finished sub 4:30 and there was no way I had a sub 4:30 in me this year.

Second (pause) and unless I botched the math, by twenty three seconds.

Are you shitting me?

I was quite proud that my sister had thought of this way to yank my chain¹.

Nope. Oh well, there's always next year.

Academy of Pain

Overview

I ran a mostly leisurely 50.21 miles in the twelve hours from 6am to 6pm.

The Event

Academy of Pain is a timed event, where people run loops around the Albuquerque Academy for up to twelve hours. It is put on by Julie Tertin and her Albuquerque Trail Running Crew. This may seem like a dumb thing to do, and that's what it's billed as and that's what people want. See the discussion tab to read other people's praise.

The Conflict

This year AoP was held as the same day as the Burque Brew Tour Crowning. The Brew Tour has been held since 2014. AoP premiered last year (2022). There's not—yet—a huge overlap between the people who attend AoP and the Brew Tour, but I'm one of them and that left me with a dilemma.

Why Not Both?

The rules for many, if not most, timed running events are that you can leave the course any time you want, as long as you return to where you left, but when you're not on course, your miles don't count.

Since the BBTC race was only 3.8 miles, I could have done AA laps, then drove down to Bomb's Away, run the BBTC, drove back and resumed where I had left off, but that make it hard for me to run an easy fifty AoP miles, due to the timing. It would also curtail my socializing at BBTC. So, I chose to run from AoP to BBTC, run the BBTC race, then run up, and then continue to run AoP.

Sheepishly, I explained my plan to Julie in advance and asked her whether she'd count my miles outside the Albuquerque Academy perimeter as AoP miles. I would be happy whatever her decision was, because she's the race director and RDs have to balance a lot more than can be seen from the outside.

Reasons to not allow extra-curricular miles involve the difference in elevation change, the ability of a participant to cheat, the difference between whole loops (a loop is 3.3 miles at minimum) and mere mileage and the degradation of the social experience. Luckily, Julie granted my dispensation, so now it was just an exercise in logistics.

Preparation

For me, running a slow 50 miles requires water and probably calories. I'll also need to use a restroom once or twice. Although not strictly necessary, having a plan for where I'll run which miles will put my mind at ease, so I drew up this one:

Water was easy. I have a seven gallon water jug I keep in my truck (along with the lugaloo). I have a running belt that holds two six ounce water bottles. It'll be sufficiently cool that I can drink water between AA laps and use my the water bottles in my running belt to get me to Bombs Away, where they can be refilled for my trip back.

Food was easy too, sort-of. These events are done in a semi pot-luck fashion. You bring more of what you have than you plan to eat and you share what you have with others. I had a big box of leftovers from the Foothills Fat Ass, but it was at my mother's house, where my sister and I have taken over her den to use as storage. I didn't pick up the box until pretty close to race day, and then I saw that all that remained were things that required hot water (e.g. instant oatmeal, coffee).

I knew it would be chilly, so I figured I'd simply bring that box of stuff, two thermoses filled with boiling water and two stoves (a small JetBoil that heats a single serving very quickly and a larger propane stove that can heat an entire pan). People could immediately use the water from a thermos, and if they wanted to kill time and replenish it from a stove, great! If not, oh well, it's better than nothing.

I also brought a big baggie of various gels and a large package of Jolly Rancher hard candies.

I made a bunch of double espressos and laid out my clothes and electronics. I created a surprisingly large pile of things in the front-hall, including our thermoses, the stoves and fuel.

Race Day

I woke up at 5, weighed myself, ate a serving of oatmeal and started boiling water for the thermoses. It seemed like I had all the time in the world, so I also decided to make myself another serving of fortified oatmeal. I got distracted and of course water boiled all over the place. Time ticked away.

It took me many trips to load everything into the truck. Our front door doesn't work, so I have to go out the back door and around the side of the house. Time ticked away.

I drove the five minutes to the Cherry Hills Library parking lot and was about to start schlepping things the short distance (albeit with a traffic light in between) to the staging area when I saw people were running. I glanced at my watch and sure enough, it was 6am.

So, gang aft agley, I left everything in the back of the truck and ran.

I caught up with Julie, Dustin and a few others. They were headed counter-clockwise, so very briefly I was following my plan.

Initial "loops"

It was fun to run and chat with others. I got to hear a little bit about what people had done since I saw them last and what was upcoming. I was surprised to see my friend David, because all of his Strava tracks for what seemed like an eternity, were from Australia. I thought he might have moved down there, but it was only a six week relocation.

People were running faster than I had thought I'd run, which meant that if did "washing-machine" loops (i.e., alternating between counter-clockwise and clockwise), I would be at the corner of Wyoming and Academy well before 8:30. With that in mind, I decided that since my running was going to be mileage based rather than loop based, I'd opportunistically switch directions to link up with other groups of runners. This way I also got to spend some time with Geoff and Jan.

To Bombs Away

At 8:27 I headed south on Wyoming, five and a half miles south to Central. After a couple of turns I was at Bombs Away. I got there with plenty of time, which meant I spent a little time chatting with people (especially Perky & Prince Charming) and maybe a little time running back and forth to accrue some "buffer" mileage.

Ten AM rolled around and we were off. My initial plan was to run at a leisurely pace, but it seemed like I could finish as first male without having to red-line it, so I did.

Post BBTC

After crossing the finish line, I headed back up the course to run in with Dennis, then I turned around and headed back out again so I could run/walk in with his wife Glenda. This gave me a little extra mileage, a little extra tine to chat with them and also kept them in my sights so I could hand them the ticket for the free beer I won by being first male. I think we're even on beers now. They bought me two beers after the Black Friday Turkey Trots, and I was able to win a beer at V-Day and another here at the Crowning.

Eventually I went inside to briefly socialize and scarf two small bags of popcorn (probably not vegan due to the butter flavor), taking a third for the road. At 11:30 I bade au revoir and started running back up to Albuquerque Academy. This time I had something to do when I had to stop at stoplights: eat popcorn.

I got to my truck and used the water from the least efficient thermos (not actually a real Thermos) to heat up four servings of instant oatmeal. I also ate three caffeinated gels and drank a double espresso before grabbing a handful of Jolly Rancher hard candies and heading over to the trash can. I deposited the oatmeal wrappers and an empty potato chip wrapper, then peeled each of the Jolly Ranchers before stuffing them into my mouth.

I temporarily put my Albuquerque Road Runners crop top back on so I could use the library's facilities, then took it off, put it back in my truck, double checked that my truck keys were in a zippered pocket that I had zippered shut¹ and headed out for more fun.

Final "loops"

I had done 32 miles now, which meant if did five more loops I would be about a mile and a half shy of fifty miles. I had plenty of time to figure out a plan. By now there weren't nearly as many people on the course as there had been in the morning. It also wasn't clear exactly who was part of the event. As such, I cranked out loops washing machine style, saying hi to the lovebirds as I passed.

As I was finishing my post-BBTC fifth AA lap, I looked at the time and decided I did not want to run quickly enough to do an entire sixth lap. I had seen Julie, Dustin and their dog doing a clockwise lap while I was going counter-clockwise, so I decided I'd simply keep going counter clockwise past where I'd normally change directions, run into them, head to the finish with them and then do whatever short out-and-back I'd need to get my fifty.

Like many of my other AoP plans, that didn't happen. I did indeed continue going around counter-clockwise, but I didn't see the trio, so when I was about a mile from the start/finish with forty-nine miles on my feet I turned around and finished up. Luckily they were there so I got to thank them (but not nearly enough!), before grabbing my stuff, walking over to my truck and turning off my GPS sports watch.

Fear Itself

I very much looked forward to the Academy of Pain this year because I saw it as a test to see how well my right foot would hold up.

I developed a hot-spot in my foot after running the Deadman Peaks 106 miler six days after running the Javelina Jundred. My training for the Bataan Memorial Death March further aggravated my hot-spot and so I bit the bullet and had a shot of cortisone on March 10th (which was the day before the King of the Hill 10k ruck, nine days before the Bataan Memorial Death March and sixteen days before the Academy of Pain).

Wanting to run the Cocodona 250 in 2023, I figured if I couldn't run an easy fifty miles at AoP, I had no business even considering C250. I'm happy with my performance and will now see if I can muster the resources to enter.

Thank you, Julie!

Burque Brew Tour Crowning

The Burque Brew Tour Crowning is social event with a little race prepended so the guests have something to do before the bar opens.

Ostensibly, the king and queen of the Burque Brew Tour are crowned for garnering the most points for their sex in the four previous BBT races: the Black Friday Turkey Trots, Grinch Lunch, Resolutions Stink! and V-Day. This year, the king's head was too big for a crown, so instead the winners were adorned with visibility Xinglets.

I chose to run to the event, run the event and run back. Although I live only 7.7 miles away, I chose an 18.8 mile route down. Additionally, I chose to abstain from three things that I normally do when I'm racing at this distance

1. drink espresso timed to maximally contribute to my pace
2. bring water to cool me down
3. listen to my Speed 3 Playlist

However, after Perky fired the shotgun and we were off, it looked like I might be able to win a free beer for the Muirheads if I ran a little faster than I would have preferred.

This was new ground for me. I hadn't run eighteen miles to get to the start of a race before, although I do plan on doing the Boston Marathon Double someday. That's when you start at the finish line and unofficially run to the start line, then officially run the Boston Marathon. If anyone drops a wheelbarrow of cash on me, I'll do it this year, but that seems unlikely.

I've also never raced in the middle of a timed event where I have my heart set on cranking out an easy fifty miles. I'm pretty darned sure that if I ran too quickly I'd stress my legs too much and the remaining 27.4 miles I needed to finish post-race would be annoying and I'm a big baby¹. What I didn't know was what would be too quickly in this context.

Luckily, I didn't find out. I ran quickly enough to win a free beer for Glenda, but slowly enough that the rest of my day was skittles.

Normally, I include Strava tracks for each of my races, but my Academy of Pain Strava Tracks subsume my Crowning Race. Look around mile 20. In theory, I averaged about an 8:10 pace (minutes per mile).

Whee!

Berta Fun Run

Background

This was the final event in the >>Albuquerque Road Runners FreeforAll series. I accidentally missed the first event due to forgetting to put it on my calendar. I ran with John Farrow as a partner in Relay RePlay, the second event. I chose not to run the third event, Pi(e) Day. It was on a Tuesday evening and I couldn't get myself out the door.

This is the fifteenth Berta Run. The run is named after the street that KK, the hostess lives on. Each year the course is a bit different, but it's in Edgewood NM, so most of the course is going to be about 7,000 feet above sea level and there will be hills.

Race Day

Other than a few usual suspects, I didn't really know who all would attend. I was happy to see my friend Spencer there. He had to cancel out of Shenanigains at the last minute, so it's been a while since I saw him. Turns out, he kept me honest and I, he.

Since this is a Road Runner event, I wore my ARR crop-top pre-run, but took it off for the race itself. Yay! I remembered something. It wasn't until after we were running that I realized that I had forgotten to take my pre-race double espresso. Oh well.

Spencer and I took the lead within the first mile. He's light on his feet and would get ahead of me on the uphills, then I'd pass him on the downhills. Uh oh. This is going to be an actual race, where if I push myself fairly hard I have a chance of winning, but if I don't, it'll be another second.

Although the course was explained to me, and I had a map, I wanted to turn where the course didn't go and then almost missed a turn. Luckily, Spencer let me know when I was about to go off course. I also wasn't completely sure where all the hills would be, nor the total distance of the course, so when it looked like I was on the final downhill, I cranked up my pace until my HR was at around 160 and did seven tenths of a mile in 4:18, a 6:09 pace. I did not want Spencer catching me in the final stretch (which turned out to be a .3 mile uphill).

According to my GPS watch, there was 541 feet of gain, I averaged an 8:22 min/mile pace, with an average heart rate of 146 bpm, with my best mile being 7:03. Strava's numbers are similar.

Food

The post race spread was glorious, most of which was homemade by KK, although Perky and Prince Charming brought a vegan cherry pie. Here's what I remember I ate (all vegan): tomato and veggie casserole, bean stew, slice of cherry pie, overnight oats with tiramisu-like topping, chips and salsa, grapes, mixed nuts and gummy candy. There was also beer and mimosas—but it's not June 25th yet—and plenty of non-vegan food, apple juice, coffee, etc.

Gratitude

I'm very lucky to have found the Albuquerque Road Runners. If you're in (or visiting) Albuquerque, check them out.

Cocodona 250

Cocodona 250 is an epic race and I will try to write an epic race report. In the meantime, I finished in 114:19:53, which was a little less than ten hours before the final cutoff, not too different from last year.

I'm pretty sure that if the race were scored by how many different venomous animals one saw, especially if the strength of the venom were taken into account, I would have won, as I document in my "creepy crawly race report".

Rigged!

The Cocodona 250 was rigged¹ in my favor, and thus I won. At least with respect to seeing venomous animals. Unfortunately, I currently only have a photo of two of the trifecta.

Initially, I chose to have my phone off rather than in airplane mode. It was only when I saw the gila monster that I realized I might actually see something others wouldn't. I started powering up my phone, but the monster had left by the time I could take a picture. Luckily, this was on the first day, so there were other runners nearby. I pointed the gila monster out to at least one who took a picture. Maybe someday I'll see it. I didn't, however, think to get that runner's name or bib number.

If you took a photo of a gila monster on the first day—especially if il mostro was pointed out to you by a guy too stupid to wear a hat in the sun—please contact me.

By the second day, I was running solo mostly. Coming off of Mount Mingus, there's an interminable trail that is normally fairly runnable, but had me walking due to a "minor" foot injury. After miles of not seeing anyone,I saw three participants off the trail and initially, I couldn't figure out what they were doing. The trail itself was level, but the land was sloped on either side of it. They were uphill at an awkward, but not dangerous angle. I thought perhaps one was taking a poop and the other two were standing guard, but that didn't make a lot of sense.

"Caution!"
"What?"
"Snake!"
"What kind of snake?"
"Rattler!"
"What kind of rattler?"
"I don't know!?!"
"Where?"
"It's a big snake, next to that big rock and it's not moving!"

It took me a little while to find the medium sized snake next to the small rock. Furthermore, being tired, I didn't process "it's not moving" as "it's standing it's ground"; I was thinking more like "perhaps it's dead." Nope. It was a healthy adult Mojave rattler. I got out my phone, got close enough to get a low-resolution picture, spoke calmly to it, then walked widely around it. I stayed on the trail, but I believe I was well outside its striking distance.

"What the fuck? That snake was threatening us. Why wasn't it threatening him?"
"Maybe he's a snake whisperer"

Heh. I was tempted to shout back that it was OK, because although I'm young, I was actually doing this year's Cocodona 250 sober and rattlesnakes bite young drunk men.

The following day I was hiking up the penultimate big climb and I saw a centipede. Although I know the difference between diamondback, timber and Mojave rattlers, I didn't know much about various centipedes. I had a vague recollection of seeing a video of someone getting bitten by one, but I got a photo and video of the large colorful one I saw. Once I had a chance to search the web, sure enough, I had seen a giant desert centipede, which was indeed the species that Coyote Peterson had bite him.

I also saw a horned toad. They're common, and they're not venomous, but they can squirt blood from their eyes. It's also amazing how camouflaged they are.

FTR, I did not hear of any bites or stings, nor did I see anyone "attacked" by teddy bear cholla, but there was some teddy bear cholla out there on the first day. I've run the Javelina Jundred eleven times and I'd guess about a third of the times I've seen someone with at least a few balls stuck to them. Once again, Coyote Peterson illustrates.

I've done a bunch of running in the Arizona and New Mexico desert and I've seen rattlesnakes (mostly diamondbacks) before. I don't recall seeing a gila monster, but I do have a poor memory. I have seen centipedes every once in a while, but there's no fucking way I'd see all three in a single race if it weren't rigged. Come on! I'm not stupid!

Western States

This one will take a little bit of yak shaving to write up. In the meantime, here are some notes to myself.

• 2015

  • Signing up for the Grand Slam
  • The SAR mission where I injured my foot
  • "Run the first 33 miles with a limp" strategy
  • Leading Gunhild Swanson off course
  • DNF

• 2023

  • Pre-race
    • Meeting Jim (James Keller) and Emily in Reno
    • Peter Livingstone, my right-hand man (crew & pacer)
    • No overnight parking citation
    • Young Dirty Rob (Robin Mcdearmon)
    • Pre-race meeting Matt (Hagen), Ian (???) and Marty (Gardner)
    • Cardiovascular Survey
  • Race
    • Chatting with Matt, but not recognizing him
    • Chatting with Ken Ward
    • Falling a couple of times on the snow
    • Four hours (IIRC) before taking another ibuprofen (I think I took one before the start)
    • 200mg ibuprofen every hour and a half
    • 500mg acetaminophen every three hours
    • Pete was my crew until he was my pacer
    • Foot mostly held up (albeit with analgesics) to around mile 70
    • I didn't know the end of the course very well
    • speed vs. foot discomfort balance
    • stacked a little early after Green Gate
    • stopped analgesics when confident that I'd finish with a big buffer
    • slowed to a crawl at the end (due to discomfort)
    • mini sprint at end (but not across the line; too gassed)
  • Post Race
    • food line too long for my right foot
    • slept
    • forgot about cardiovascular survey
    • Ate a jar of jalapeno stuffed olives

BARGE Fun Run (or Walk or Unicycle)

BFR 2023

It was fun! (Duh! It's in the flipping name).

We will meet a little before 7am (and probably wait a little for stragglers--like we always do) outside the North Tower entrance. That's the entrance nearest the North Garage. We'll head out in a clockwise direction going on Joe Brown toward Karen. Then it's a bunch of right turns. People who want to do a 5k will make a loop. People who want to do a shorter distance will need to turn around at the halfway point for whatever distance they want to do.

GamboMouse and mickdog ran. It hadn't yet hit 100F. Blues walked. I walked with him so as not to spill my beer. We four had left at 7am promptly, which was a first but not what I said we'd do. But it was hot. We were in Las Vegas, in July, in the middle of a heat wave, and the sun was shining.

Although an annual tradition, we knew—with this temperature—we'd be few. After the weather forecast, only two others had expressed an interest and one of them, Messenger of Doom, had been up late the night before¹.

It's Vegas. I played the odds… and lost. Her text was polite, but she was a little surprised and mildly disappointed that we had left without her. I gave vague directions to Blues, then "ran" back for her.

She and I jogged our way around, discussing our paths to increased fitness and eventually wondering where Blues was.

We finished our lap and GamboMouse was waiting for us. and for Blues². and for mickdog³. It was a complete success if you ignore the fact that we lost two of the five participants and that I didn't actually bring the BARGE Fun Run bottle openers that I had promised to bring⁴.

I can't wait until next year!

Background

BARGE is a gathering of people who have an interest in gambling who typically have some sort of tie to people who were exploring gambling on the internet before the World Wide Web.

In addition to the officially scheduled activities, groups of BARGErs get together for both ad-hoc and recurring unofficial activities. Want to get a group of people to go indoor skydiving? You're not alone, a bunch of BARGErs have done it. Pinball Museum? Check. Do you love sushi? Some of us go there every year. Ethiopian? That was a regular event too (until it wasn't).

In 2008, after taking second place in a BARGE weight loss bet, during which he acquired a running habit, Ron Grossberg proposed a BARGE Fun Run. It wasn't widely announced and nobody—not even Ron—attended. He liked running, but early morning and heat were not for him. Not that year.

Perseverance pays and the following year the Fun Run was once again announced⁵ and this time it was actually held. Turns out BARGE already included a few runners (I certainly wasn't one of them though!). Who knew?

In 2009, I had been hiking for a few years and thought it would be fun to show up for the fun run and attempt to run a mile with a few of my fellow BARGErs even though I had never (to my knowledge) run a mile non-stop in my life⁶.

I guessed my fitness from hiking would be enough to allow me to do that, but I honestly knew nothing about running and as BARGE 2009 approached, I got nervous. A family member of a friend had a seizure one day when simply walking a bit in the heat. Maybe before I get to Las Vegas, I should try running just to see what it's like. So that's what I did. On July 22nd, 2009, safely in Albuquerque, I ran my first mile and was gobsmacked that I liked it.

One thing led to another (rolls eyes)… and now I run a lot. The toughest race I do each year is the Sandia Snowshoe, but the funnest run I do each year, well, now you know…the rest of the story.

Folks,

Final details of the 2nd Annual BARGE Fun Run, the only free unofficial BARGE event:

The Fun Run will be 2 miles long, you don't have to run the entire way, but if you aren't running, you will have to be observant (you are a poker player, so of course you are observant!) and be able to follow the trail markings.

Meet at 8:15am on the Binion's side of Freemont St. Experience Friday morning before the TOC. We will have a pre-run briefing and start promptly at 8:30am.

There is no sign up, no participation fee, and no liability insurance. I recommend you bring your own water. Any and all are encouraged to attend. We will probably mob Starbucks for smoothies after the run.

-R

Tatonka 5k 2023

Overview

This was the eighth edition of the Tatonka 5k "Fun Run". This was my second time running it. I only learned about it last year.

Declan, Matthew's son, turned eight today, but couldn't be here. He lives back east. So, pre-race, his grandmother led the crowd, singing Happy Birthday, which was recorded and sent to him.

Happy Birthday, Declan!

Matthew's mother and brother run this event, and they're supported by amazing volunteers, including JROTC students from the local high schools.

In addition to it being a celebration of Matthew's life, this run is a fundraiser for the Green Beret Foundation.

Pre Race

Once again, my buddy Don was there and although I remembered his name, I had forgotten that this Don was the same Don who taught Physics at USMA, which is where Iris, one of our (my wife's and my) twin daughters is going to school. Don introduced me to Amy, who was to take first in the female 50-100 age group.

There are only two age groups: 10-49 and 50-100¹. Pre-race I ran into my friend George and his son George. George is 48, while George is 18. I don't remember George's father's age, but I do remember his name: George. That George, i.e., George's father, was a liaison (I think that's the name of the position) for high school students who apply to USMA. George himself, went to the Air Force Academy. His son, George, goes to UNM, which is where Margaret—our other twin daughter—is enrolled.

After readying my ruck (there's no separate rucksack division; I just use this race to help me ease into my Bataan Memorial Death March training), I hung out with Don and Amy as we all sang (at least those of us who weren't too choked up) Happy Birthday to Declan. The color guard and National Anthem were next. After a description of the course, we started promptly at 10am.

The Race

Like last year, the race was held in the New Mexico Veterans Memorial. This year, however it was much more twisty, because it was basically two 1.55 mile loops as opposed to last year when it was approximately three 1.16 mile loops².

This year, a combination of a foot injury and a rib injury kept me from running, much less running with a pack, for the last several months. As such, I knew I was out of shape, so I pulled out all the stops. I had a double espresso a little more than a half hour before the race started; I wore my ice hat filled with ice and I carried two hand-helds, each filled with ice water.

My goal was to not go out too quickly, but to rev my heart up to around 160 beats per minute and hold it there. If there were people to pass or people to prevent from passing while I was up in my redline, I'd try my best, but nope. Sadie came in 26th, in 29:29.6. Eighteen seconds later I finished at 27th in 29:47.7 and I didn't see Erin in back of me, but she finished less than seven seconds after I did, in 28th at 29:54.5.

I'm happy that I was able to rev up my heart rate and keep it up. I'm realistic enough to not be surprised that I was 38 seconds per mile slower this year even though my average heart rate was 4 beats per minute faster. Fitness is a thing, and I've lost a bunch.

Post Race

This year I drank my rice milk and ate my recovery fortified oatmeal before drinking my celebratory beer. I took a few photos as Amy and George took first in their (age, sex) divisions and chuckled as the announcer wasn't completely sure what was going on with George Sefzik taking first and George J. Sefzik taking fourth. I suggested that cheating might be involved.

It was a largely unknown event held in a largely unknown venue. And yet… it's growing.

Before leaving, I hugged mom McClintock and tried to speak.

Duke City Marathon 2023

Overview

My first twenty six miles were much more consistent than last year, but they were consistently slow due to the apparent extra mileage that my watch had at the end. So, my final time was 5:00:37 and that's with me running the last .44 miles at an 8:57 min/mile pace. Prior to that, my fastest mile was 11:02 and my slowest was 11:46.

Failure

I believe I was probably a net asset as a pacer this year, but only because, as far as I know, nobody was actually using me to break five hours, but I could be wrong about that.

Thirty seven seconds may not seem like much, but it's unacceptable as is, and that was after me speeding up at the end. If I had run my last .43 miles at the 11:22 minute per mile pace that I had averaged (assuming the mileage from my GPS watch was correct), I would have been 100 seconds over my 5:00:00.00 goal.

More Later…

It was a fine event and I enjoyed talking with the people around me, many of whom were doing DCM as their New Mexico marathon for the Fifty States Marathon Club. I did not, however, take notes and I had to scramble a bit in the days after DCM to get ready for the Javelina Jundred. So, when (if?) I go back to write up more, I'll fail at that, too.

Javelina Jundred 2023

Overview

Javelina Jundred was my first 100 miler, back in 2012. My dad and Jeanne, his wife, lived in nearby Gold Canyon, so I visited with them before and after the race. They even came out to see me "run". I wound up coming back, year after year after year. In 2020, my dad died, but Jeanne continued to live there, so I continued visiting her, until this year. Earlier in the year Jeanne moved to Chicago so she could be near her great granddaughter.

It was strange not seeing Jeanne this year, but I did see many of my running friends, including my two Hardrock 2021 pacers: Peter Livingstone and Mark Werkmeister. I listed Peter first, because he got the easier job of pacing me first at Hardrock. Mark paced cleanup, and it was messy. For JJ100M 2023, I saw Mark first, because he graciously picked me up Friday at my house on his drive down from Santa Fe and dropped me back home on Monday.

I finished in 23:07:10 which was first in my age group (male 60-69). Nobody my age or older beat me.

My right foot

Considering how badly my right foot hurt at the end of Western States, I went into JJ100M with some trepidation and a lot of analgesics at hand. Unlike WSER, the analgesics were sufficient to allow me to run w/o discomfort, but I did choose to go slower than I might have had I not worried about my foot.

More Later…

I am still crazy behind in everything, so I haven't had a chance to write up this race yet. I did, however, take a few notes, so it is likely that I'll write a real race report someday.

Deadman Peaks 53 Miler 2023

Overview

Finishing in 14:44:34, I was 13th out of 19 finishers. Five starters Did Not Finish.

I deliberately ran slowly because I was concerned about my right foot.

Experiment in white

I chose to wear the same white shirt and white arm bands during the portion of the race with the most sun exposure. There was ice at La Ventana aid station which helped, but unfortunately none at the turnaround. Overall I think it helped, but it's hard to say because I was deliberately running slowly.

A couple of awesome first fifty milers

I wound up catching up to Carlos, a runner from Los Alamos that I hadn't previously met. We wound up chatting for quite a bit. It was his first fifty miler and he was getting it done. Yay!

In the final segment I caught up with Candace, a Navajo runner and she too was running her first fifty miler. I hung out with her as she made the final big climb and she did it faster than I probably would have had I not had such excellent company.

Darkness

I've been caught out in the dark on that course a couple of times and it is unpleasant. This year I chose not to have a bag at the turnaround and to simply have two headlamps with me in my ultra vest and a complete Kogolla kit in my Mesa Portales drop bag. That worked well, since not only did I have a light for myself, I had a backup in case that light failed or I ran across a runner needing a headlamp (which is exactly what happened).

My right foot

Surprisingly, my right foot held up exceedingly well. I did three new things that may have helped:

1. I trimmed the custom orthotic that I wear in my right shoe
2. I wore Smartwool socks instead of my usual Balega or Drymax socks
3. I wore my final pair of Olympus 4 instead of one of my Olympus 5 pairs

I can't untrim the orthotic, so that change is permanent whether it helped or not. I will wear an Olympus 5 pair for the White Mesa Fat Ass 50k but still use the Smartwool socks. Then, I'll use the result of that experiment to decide what to wear for Socorro Souls of Sorrow. So, two weeks from now I'll probably have more insight into what's causing the trouble than I've had in the previous eleven months.

More later…

Maybe. I'm still pretty behind in everything.

White Mesa Fat Ass 50k 2023

Overview

Sophie Geernaert and I were the only two to do an entire 50k, but there were fifteen signed participants (and another runner who chose to run without signing up).

Not only did I get off course, but I led other people off course, too.

FWIW, I dubbed this a "Leisurely White Mesa Fat Ass 50k", because my average heart rate was only 125. 130 and below is leisurely in my lexicon.

Sadness

WMFA50k was not only on Veteran's Day this year, but it was also the day of Chuck Fuller's Memorial Service. I knew Chuck as Dennis Muirhead's Wednesday running partner. I looked forward to seeing them when our paths intersected. WMFA50k had already been on the calendar for months when his memorial was scheduled, so I had to be there in spirit, which made for a day of mixed emotions.

Weather

The weather was excellent, however, a freak snowstorm had hit Albuquerque the day before and I expected much worse weather for the event. I wound up encouraging people who weren't going to do the full 50k to start late, which made it a tiny bit less social, but seemed like a prudent thing to do at the time.

Aid

Since I was worried about the temperature, I brought a thermos full of very hot water, and some "just add hot water" food and beverages: coffee, hot chocolate and oatmeal. I also made available a few things, like ramen, that need to be heated for a while in hot water, and to heat them, a small propane stove and pan.

I don't think any of the heated stuff got consumed, although I do think a bottle of Pepsi was taken. I can't be sure, because I was on drugs¹.

Socorro Souls of Sorrow 2023

TODO

Ed Thanksgiving's Group Run 2023

TODO

Black Friday Turkey Trots 2023

TODO

Bosque Bigfoot 50k 2023

TODO

Unicycling

Da fuq? Unicycling isn't running.

True. However, after the foot injury that started in November 2022 lasted through my BMDM training, my Cocodona 250 "run" and Western States, I've decided to let the foot heal. Taking a spill on July 1st and bruising one or more ribs cemented the deal.

So, now that I'm in my "Fun Around" training block, I'm going to rejuvenate my unicycling skill so that I'll be ready to buy a mountain unicycle by the time there is snow in the Sandias. Then, assuming I get permission from the race director, I'll train for and compete in the White Mountains 100, a 100 mile race in Alaska at the end of March. Yes, it's been done before.

Craft Poker Outsiders' Fun Club

It may take me a while to get it off the ground, but I'm starting the Craft Poker Outsiders' Fun Club, a group to encourage people to get physically outside (if it will benefit them) and/or to get outside their comfort zone (if it will benefit them) rather than staying indoors and participating in addictive behavior.

Background

I'm sort of cheating by choosing unicycling as an example of me getting outside my comfort zone, because I used to be an OK unicyclist, "back in the day." At one point I owned five unicycles:

• A 20" diameter wheeled one I used for teaching unicycling
• "My own" 20" diameter wheeled one (that wasn't quite so beaten up)
• A 24" diameter wheeled unicycle for commuting
• A 5' chain driven giraffe
• A 36" diameter unicycle[^1] made by Tom Miller of The Unicycle Factory

OTOH, I'll be 61 for the 2024 White Mountains 100 and I really haven't unicycled much in the last thirty years.

More Later…

[^1] I got this one in 1989, while working as a contractor for Salomon Brothers. I commuted to work from Battery Park City to their place on Water Street (before they moved to 7 WTC).

My Beliefs

As I mention elsewhere, I have a ton of beliefs and I'm sure many are wrong.

This section is for my running beliefs. Eventually, I may add belief sub-sections to Programming, Poker and perhaps even Bataan.

I get the runner's high. The runner's high used to be explained by endorphins. It's now explained by endocannabinoids. Who knows, for me it might actually be nothing more than the placebo effect. I still, however, often get the runner's high.

Oh my. This needs its own page, but starting on a unicycle ride in Las Vegas during BARGE, I got the runner's high while riding my unicycle. I was absolutely not expecting it, because I've ridden my bike thousands of miles over the last N > 10 years and never gotten the runner's high riding a bicycle.

Knees

The following is how I think my knees work. I am not telling you how your knees work.

In the beginning

When I started running, one knee would always chirp at some distance. As time went on, that distance increased. Eventually it didn't chirp (although I did get orthotics, see below).

I fall a lot. Historically, that was due to either poor eyesight combined with wearing sunglasses when I shouldn't, or getting lost in thought. Over time I've taught myself to take off the sunglasses in dim light or even in bright light with tricky shadows. Although I've made some progress in not getting lost in thought, it still happens.

In general, when I fall and scrape up my knee, there might be minor discomfort in that knee for a day or two and the scab would be gone in two weeks, leaving behind a veneer of scar tissue at worst.

A dozen years later

On September 10th, 2022, however, I took a pretty nasty fall while running the Big Cottonwood Marathon. That scab didn't completely disappear for five weeks and the external scar tissue didn't go away for about six months. I had intermittent knee pain for about four months, but I kept training and it fully resolved.

Orthotics

When I was in eighth grade, I stress fractured a small bone inside my foot when I was jumping out of a swing for distance. My dad was in the Air Force, so I had free medical care. The foot doctor that I saw told me that I had extremely high arches and that I needed custom orthotics or I wouldn't be able to walk when I was thirty.

The custom orthotics were made of some extremely hard plastic. I was told that the plastic would never break, but to be very careful if it did, because it would be extremely sharp. Within a year or two, using a spade, I broke the orthotic, without cutting my foot. The pieces were indeed fairly sharp. I threw them away and never wore them, or any other orthotics, until after I took up running.

So, the claim that I wouldn't be able to walk when I was thirty was bogus. However, when I took up hiking, I was having some knee pain and a friend of mine introduced me to a woman who made custom orthotics. She made some for me and they seemed to help. Eventually, after having worn through a pair or two of her custom orthotics, I found she had retired, so I switched to another orthotic maker. I was his problem client. It took a bit of fiddling around to get them just right, but I've been wearing his orthotics ever since. He is now mostly retired, but still sees some of his old clients.

At one point I decided to forego the custom orthotics because I really didn't know if they were working or if it was more akin to all the ankle support I initially needed when I was hiking and in the beginning of my running. As my ankles got stronger, I needed less support. So, perhaps I didn't need these "fancy" orthotics after all. Without them (and it's been so long since I experimented, that I can't remember if I went with no orthotics or off-the-shelf ones), my knee discomfort returned.

From my point-of-view, it's possible that if I had continued to train without the custom orthotics that my knees would get used to it (or the nocebo effect would wear off) and my discomfort would go away. However, I also figure it's possible that I'd do damage and I already had the custom orthotics, so I went back to using them.

(Possibly incorrect) Conclusions

I do not think my knees are "consumable." I do not think that running— even with a pack—the way I do it, is damaging my knees. I believe that running strengthens my knees.

I do believe that falling damages my knees and I really am trying to fall less.

For what it's worth, I know many people who have injured their knees playing basketball or soccer and a few who have injured their knees running. I've torn a ligament in my left shoulder and I'm very glad that I run on my legs and not my arms.

I do not wish knee damage on anyone. I would hate for people to emulate my behavior and damage their knees. I am, however, quite glad that I've continued training even when one of my knees (typically, the one that I fell on most recently) "chirp".

I'll admit it: I don't know how my knees work, but I have my strong suspicions. I don't know if what I'm doing will eventually catch up with me, but I've been training hard for the Bataan Memorial Death March (or a substitute in the years when it wasn't held in person) for well over ten years. My training begins in mid November and lasts until mid March. During those months I'm running with my pack two or more times a week most weeks.

Sunglasses Addendum

In Silverton this year (2023), I bought a pair o sunglasses that were designed for trail runners and specifically address the contrast issue. Unlike some of my fancier sunglasses from the past (when I had ridiculous amounts of free cash), they are not photo-gray, but so far, I've found them living up to their hype. I wear them in situations where I wouldn't have worn my other pairs and I haven't—knock wood—fallen yet.

Unicycle Addendum

This deserves its own page.

I started riding a unicycle at the end of June (the 28th, to be precise) 2023 after effectively a 30 year hiatus. I'm trying to ramp up my mileage so I can ride a 100 mile event in Alaska at the end of March in 2024.

My knees were absolutely unprepared for this and although I didn't get knee discomfort while I was riding, There were times when I woke up in the middle of the night with fairly intense knee pain (in just one knee) that has lasted for about a half hour. Surprisingly, the pain always diminished to discomfort and was typically gone by the time I awoke.

This mystery pain happened a few days in a row, but never more than three days in a row, if I remember correctly. It was something I was paying attention to, and I became concerned, but not worried.

However, when I had the trouble I did not back down my mileage; I increased it and the problem went away. Eventually, however, I did back down my mileage, but that had to do with my right foot healing up and me wanting to do a lot more running to regain some the fitness I lost (and to lose some of the weight I gained).

So, AFAICT, unicycling put different stresses on my knees than running had and my body adapted to them. Yay.

Rest Days

I believe rest days are exceedingly important to my weekly training, but I do not believe that I need to be placed in a medically induced coma on rest days. In fact, I run, ride my bike, hike, unicycle and even do my core exercises (sit-ups, push-ups and unweighted squats) on what I sincerely claim are rest days.

My criterion is simple, I ask myself if what I'm doing is at a low enough effort level for the amount of time I do it to make it (after eating well and getting a good night's sleep) restful. That generally means that speed work, ruck runs and high volume (i.e. > 50k) preclude the day from being a rest day.

Riding a flat 100 miles on a bicycle, can be a rest day, if I keep my heart rate around 130bpm or below, even if I do it in a fasted state and completely in high gear, but it won't be a rest day if I'm not already accustomed to riding that long.

So, my typical schedule is to run six days a week and ride my bicycle or a unicycle on Sundays. The Sunday ride is almost always a rest day, because I typically do a long run on Saturday and try to do speed work on Monday. I can easily believe that I might get better results if I do even less on my rest days, but if I don't exercise at all, that tends to cause me to both have trouble sleeping and gain weight and both of those interfere with my training and performance.

I do my core exercises on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then "run" after doing them. My distance may even be 15.5 miles, but if I'm out of shape (for me), then I may walk quite a bit in those miles. On the other hand, when I'm doing that distance regularly on rest days, I might be jogging the entire time.

Bear in mind, one of the big adaptations I want (and get!) out of my body is the ability to do long distances, slowly, in close succession, whether that is doing a two hundred miler or doing the Deadman Peaks Trail Run 106 miler six days after running the Javelina Jundred.

I log my runs and rides (but not my core exercises) to Strava, so you can see my how I let my body rest between my hard days.

Programming

I'm more of a programmer than I am a runner.

Although most of this book is just running race reports, that's because I'm trying to write something for each of my events and I do a lot of events. In the past I wrote up notes to myself and I thought it wouldn't take that much more time to write reports I could share with my family or my crazy friends. Turns out I'm a slow writer in addition to being a slow runner.

Anyway, most of my programming time these days is spent writing mb2, and mb2 has its own issue tracker. So although I write more programming prose than running prose, little of it shows up here.

However, before mb2, I created some semi-notable software, including Executor¹ and multibot². Executor gave Sam Lantinga an excuse to write SDL. Although Sam probably would have created SDL regardless, I still got a nice shout-out in SDL's Credits.

For now, I'll just add a page to the programming section every once in a while, typically when I've already written the text as an email for one reason or another.

PDP-8

I went to Oyster River High School in Durham New Hampshire. At the time, ORHS had a PDP-8/e. It was one of the first computers I got to program. I had tried to build a COSMAC Elf in eighth grade, but I suck at electronics and I was living in Spain. I never finished it in part because when I returned to the U.S. I had access to ORHS's PDP-8 and the University of New Hampshire's DEC-10.

The PDP-8 at the high school had core memory but no storage. It was connected to two ASR-33 terminals, which had integrated paper-tape punchdrs and readers. These terminals were 110 baud, i.e. amazingly slow, which made it inconvenient to run software other than BASIC, since the software was loaded via the slow paper-tape reader.

BASIC could support both terminals, but without an operating system, the other software ORHS had would only run on one terminal. I was allowed to stay after school and run the other software, but it took a lot of time, because I would have to load it from paper tape, do whatever I wanted with that software and then reload BASIC before leaving.

Luckily, I taught myself enough PDP-8 machine language and assembly that I was able to later get a job programming in PDP-8 assembler at a local company. So, although my high school was my introduction to the PDP-8, the "serious" (right!) PDP-8 work I did was on a machine that ran an actual operating system (Nope! Not OS/8, but ETOS, which required a special board). Just don't try to read cards while the DECtape is spinning.

My First Hack

A friend of mine mentioned the PDP-8 earlier today and I bombarded him with the following story.

We had a PDP-8/e in high school. It had core memory, so they turned it off at night (core retains its memory without power). We ran BASIC on that machine and it had an address that you could "soft-restart" it. That address was 0200 (octal, of course). So, in the morning, the person starting the computer would make sure the toggles had that one bit set, then you'd flick the "load program counter" toggle on the front end, then hit start.

Part of the memory was reserved and not used by BASIC. I think it was reserved for the boot-loader, but I could be mistaken. Either way, I knew that I could toggle in a very small program in that space, run it and then soft-restart back into BASIC, so I wrote a tiny loop that ran through all of memory and changed the CLR (clear the accumulator) instructions into ?LSR? (load the switch register into the accumulator). I then loaded 0200 into the switch register, toggled the load program counter, then switched the 0200 toggle back down so the switch register was now 0000, then I hit start.

Surprisingly to me, BASIC ran fine as far as I could tell. That told me there were no occurrences of the 12-bit value for CLR that were important data. So,each time the LSR was hit, it loaded 0 (because that's what the toggle switches were left at by me) into the accumulator, just like a CLR would have. Wow!

The next day, however, someone did the "normal" soft restart and left the 0200 bit up after loading it into the switch register. BASIC did not run well,but surprisingly it was able to print out a garbled error message on the ASR-33 that was connected to the computer. The teacher mentioned this to the class and I asked if I could take a look. I then did my modified soft-reset (where after loading 0200 into the program counter I pushed the 0200 bit back down again) and sure enough, BASIC worked again.

We went through that game a couple days in a row and then the teacher told me she was going to call DEC in to look at our machine. I was scared, but I fessed up because I didn't want the school to have to pay for field service when there was nothing wrong. I told the teacher what I had done and she didn't believe me. She didn't think what I described would do what we saw. To some extent I understand her disbelief, because had I not tried it myself, I too would doubt that it would work (because I would assume that things would break so badly that the ASR-33 wouldn't be able to print anything!).

For the record, although I consider this a hack, I did not do it to be malicious or even out of vanity (although I'm documenting it here out of vanity). I did it because I was curious as to what would happen and I knew I could reload BASIC to restore things.

It's been too long for me to remember all of the details. I think the reason the machine was started at 0200 in the morning is that it had the side-effect of clearing out the programs that may have been left in core from previous users. OTOH, it may have been that the program counter itself got forgotten when power was turned off.

PDP-11

UNH had a few PDP-11s, but I did exceedingly little programming on them. I preferred writing Fortran and Assembly on the DEC-10 they had and mostly used the PDP-11s to get killed, repeatedly, in Zork.

Once I got kicked out of left UNH (of my own free will and an agreement with the judge to never set foot on campus again), and settled in at UNM, that changed. UNM's IT Support (then called CERT, I believe), had a PDP-11/70 that ran UNIX. In fact, it ran the Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX (2.x BSD). I programmed in C on that machine and even made a tiny contribution or two.

I am Not Worthy

Seriously

Page 3 of the ULTRIX-11 Installation Guide contains:

This software and documentation is based in part on the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution under license from the Regents of the University of California. We acknowledge the following individuals and institutions for their role in its development:

The Electrical Engineering and Conputer Sciences Department at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. Ken Arnold, Earl T. Cohen, John Foderaro, Charles Haley, Mark Horton, William Joy, Jim Kleckner, Geoffrey Peck, Cliff Matthews, University of New Mexico; Eric Shienbrood.

Those are serious people who did serious work. Go ahead and do a web search and see for yourself. You may need to tweak the names a bit, e.g., Bill Joy. I am less than serious (although I am driven).

My contribution to ULTRIX-11 was "Ulf", the <cough>Universal</cough> Lineprinter Filter. It supported two formats: the Diablo and a generic (might work with other printers). The Diablo printer might print faster if every other line was printed backward, because then you didn't have to wait for the print head to be restored to the first column as you would if every line were printed left to right. So, I wrote a filter to support that functionality. The generic format was simply to print left to right the entire time. IOW, it was a tiny hack for a very limited gain.

It's been too long for me to be sure; I may have done something else to get my name in that paragraph, but I can guarantee the sum of my contributions was completely inconsequential.

I only added this page because a good friend, after reading my PDP-8 pages had said:

I "grew up" on a PDP-11 programming…

she used scare quotes because we both know she's never grown up. Some people don't.

Ancient Peripherals

I've used toggle switches, slow (i.e., 110 baud) paper tape, DECtape, RM03s, RM05s, RK05s and other ridiculously large magnetic media that stored tiny amounts of data. I can only think of a few stories about any of them that might warrant writing down. Anyone who worked with DEC equipment back in the day played with almost all of that stuff.

I do, however, have a relatively uncommon punch card story.

Punch Cards

I used punched cards at the University of New Hampshire where I was allowed to take a few C.S. classes as a high school student. My best punch card story involves making nitrogen triiodide for the first time and making way too much of it. Luckily, it was impure for the same reason we made too much: because it was pre-internet and we had no idea what we were doing. Tiny pieces were making considerable popping noises, which made me kind of terrified of the large chunk that was sitting there … drying.

I delicately slipped a punch card under the nugget and was very slowly and cautiously walking to the exit, but before I could get there, a friend of mine, who knew what was going on, came over and struck my elbow, thus jiggling the card. KABOOM! In addition to the noise, a huge cloud of purple was released. It startled about half a dozen people who were in an adjacent room working. They didn't know what was going on, but they did have line of sight to the billowed aftermath.

Blown Opportunities

In the grand scheme of things, I think the upside I've received from doing the "right" things far exceeds the downside documented in the stories (to come) in this chapter. Still, I've had a few close calls with success that I've managed to dodge and perhaps they merit documentation.

Steve Jobs

Hello, this is Steve Jobs.

me: Uh, I'm at home. How did you get my number?

I called your office.

me: Yeah, but they're not supposed to give out my home number.

Well, I am Steve Jobs.

me: Point taken.

… [small talk elided; he called because he saw a demo of Executor/NEXTSTEP and liked it] …

So, how hard would it be to to turn the individual Mac windows into NEXTSTEP windows?

[small pause while I think about it]

me: That would be pretty hard.

OK. Bye. [hangs up phone]

The above, except for the last line, is mostly true. Were my memory better, it would be verbatim. SJ was very polite and although he did wrap up our conversation pretty quickly after I said "That would be pretty hard", he was much more polite than just saying two words and hanging up. The truth is I can't remember what he said in specific, because once I realized how badly I had botched the answer to his question, I forgot everything else (except the "How did you get my number?" portion.

Although it wasn't obvious to me at the time, the correct answer was "Steve, with your interest, I'll make it happen pretty darn quickly." I like to think that's how I would have replied, had I not been feverish in bed convalescing from pneumonia after having been treated (two bags of saline) at the hospital.

The backstory behind this is that I had undiagnosed sleep apnea that was interfering with my health for years, but working on documentation made it worse. My company had created Executor/NEXTSTEP, which allowed Steve Jobs's computers to run various Macintosh programs, including Microsoft Word and Excel. However, we were a tiny shop, so not only did I do much of the programming, I wrote all of the documentation, albeit after the programming, which was the style at the time.

In those days, software was delivered through the mail, on floppy disks and later CD-ROMs. Included was printed documentation. Printing documentation in bulk required offset printing and that required lead time. So, although I was clearly coming down with something, I figured it made sense to continue writing the documentation even as my health declined, because I'd have a lot of time to recuperate while waiting for the documentation to print.

At one point I felt bad enough to go to urgent care. After a cursory exam, I was back working. I don't even remember the diagnosis, but it wasn't anything major. I did finish the documentation and get it to the printer. I also sent out some copies of Executor/NEXTSTEP to various important people to get a little buzz going before we could release the product (when we got the manuals back from the printer). By then I was so sick I wound up in the emergency room where they examined my lungs, told me I had pneumonia, gave me antibiotics and told me to go to bed and stay there!

Executor/NEXTSTEP was a big hit. We ran a full-page ad in NEXTWORLD magazine and even though those ads were expensive, we were pulling in more than our expenses. However, before we got to making the Mac windows be native NEXTSTEP windows, NeXT stopped making hardware. For a while, NEXTSTEP was running on PCs and we did port Executor to run on PCs, but we never really recovered, in part because my apnea was holding me back considerably. Ironically, I actually came across apnea information while testing the Mac CD-ROM reading capability of Executor and that would wind up saving my life, but that's a different story.

Rust

I don't have any content for this page, but if you got here, I encourage you to learn Rust. It's super worthwhile, especially if you're getting on in years and easily forget stuff.

I would not have been able to write mb2 in any other language. I wrote multibot in Objective-C, but multibot was nowhere near as flexible as mb2. For example, multibot dealt only Texas Hold'em, Seven Card Stud and Omaha. Mb2 deals over fifty games.

Poker

Poker is an interesting (at least to me) hobby, but not one I suggest you take up. For what it's worth, in addition to poker, I like drinking alcohol, but it too is not something I suggest you take up. I'm also not trying to discourage you from either, but if you partake, I wish you the blessing of circumspection.

From a scoring point of view, poker is a zero sum game, meaning every chip you win is at someone else's expense. Spending time with friends, however, can be a positive sum endeavor, in that both you and your friend may benefit from the time you spend together (even if it's playing poker). So, social poker, from a friendship point of view doesn't have to be zero-sum, when one's utility function is more than mere chips.

My introduction was the video poker machine at the hotel I stayed in when I went to Las Vegas to see and hear the Grateful Dead play the Aladdin Theater on March 26th, 1983. That's not real poker, and I wasn't as clever as I thought I was <cough>martingale</cough>, but being a programmer, I got back to Albuquerque and coded up a video poker simulator.

Fast foward many years and I discovered IRC poker and rec.gambling. The IRC bot was dealing poker "ring games", but we could approximate tournaments by having up to 23 players at a table playing Hold'Em with a gentleman's agreement to raise the blinds periodically. That was crazy and fun, but it too wasn't real poker.

As I explored poker, I found some free software that did hand analysis and performed some simulations. It was in C, the language I was programming at the time, so I made some contributions and released the source code.

In the back of my mind, I had been thinking about writing an IRC bot to deal multi-tab;e poker tournaments (so, e.g., 23 players would initially start out on three separate tables: two with eight players and one with seven). On Halloween night, 1998, on a handful of cheap amphetimines¹ I pulled the trigger and wrote the core of multibot.

Although what I wrote on Halloween was in C, that was a proof-of-concept that I rewrote in Objective-C. Why? Because I wanted to increase my knowledge of Objective-C. My plan was to give away the source to multibot, but I wound up selling it instead, to Poker School Online.

Fast forward to April 2019 and I started work on mb2. Fast forward to January 2021 and I founded Craft Poker Co..

Anyway, I have a bunch of poker stories to share. If there's interest, I'll start populating this chapter.

WSOP Chip Bet

This one time, at band camp BARGE, after Greg Raymer had won the World Series of Poker main event, both he and "Jesus" Ferguson were present. Jesus brought with him a bunch of custom poker chips that had his face on them. He was generously giving them away to BARGErs.

I grabbed one of those custom chips and took it over to Greg, asking him to write on it "To D.H., Chris". In the spirit of BARGE¹, once I explained why I wanted it so inscribed, he cheerfully did so.

My plan was to prominently use the chip as a card protector and see if I could find a fellow BARGEr to comment on it in any way. Once the ball was rolling, I'd try to maneuver the conversation to the point where I could say something about having the chip signed by the current² WSOP champion.

At least in my mind, the pigeon would then respond with something akin to, "No, he won a few years ago" or "No, that's the 2000 World Champion." My goal was to—after a little back and forth—make a bet along the lines of "The winner of the main event in the World Series of Poker for the year 2004 wrote the inscription on this chip." And since he's at BARGE, we'll ask him and he'll verify.

Alas, this being BARGE, I was drinking. Before I knew it, the "signed" chip was gone. Presumably, I mistakenly treated it as a real chip and used it to call, bet or fold, inadvertently shorting the pot and preventing my r00l.

Bataan

My interest in the Bataan Death March came from being a participant in the Bataan Memorial Death March (BMDM). I learned about the BMDM due to a press release about the former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson. BMDM wasn't mentioned by name, but enough details were provided that I tracked it down via a web search.

I attended my first BMDM in 2010. The march is always held on a Sunday so that the day before they can have speakers. Back then, the speakers were former soldiers who had endured the actual Death March in the Philippines. My friend and I looked forward to hearing them speak, but we didn't realize that the rooms where the vets were speaking would fill up, so we got there too late and were shut out.

Disappointed, we left the building where the vets were speaking and headed over to the museum. Unbeknownst to us, one of the vets was an artist and not only were they displaying his artwork in the museum, but he was speaking there as well. There was room. We were blessed to hear Ben Steele talk.

Death March

Here are a few books that document the Bataan Death March or other atrocities in the Philippines:

• Bataan Death March: A Soldier's Story[^1]
• Charlie¹
• Ghost Soldiers
• Last Man Out
• No Uncle Sam
• Some Survived
• Tears in the Darkness²
• Tell Me Another War Story
• The Naked Soldier³

[^1] The author, James Bollich, was one of the two Bataan Death March survivors to speak at the Bataan Memorial Death March in 2019. The other was Ben Skardon.

Memorial Death March

For now, most of my Bataan Memorial Death March material is in its own GitHub repository. However, I'm honored to be the face of civilian heavy, both on the registration page and a Facebook post from January 13th, 2023.

Welcome Back

The last pre-covid year the Bataan Memorial Death March was held in person was 2019. That year our twin daughters were fourteen years and a half years old. They and my wife did the Honorary (fourteen and a half! mile) course.

The 2020 edition of the Bataan Memorial Death March was canceled less than a week before it was to happen. Covid was fairly new, but the organizers chose to err on the side of caution. There was no attempt to hold an in-person BMDM in 2021, but they did provide a virtual substitute. The BMDM was to have been held both virtually and in person in 2022, but the in-person event was scuttled.

In 2023, the event returned to White Sands Missile Range and both our twins and I did the full. Iris, still in high school at the time, was in the Civilian Light division. Margaret, then a freshman at the University of New Mexico, was part of a five person ROTC light team. Once again, I competed in Civilian Heavy. Jeff, my brother-in-law, walked the Civlian Light.

Thanks

Ray Wylie Hubbard closes his song Mother Blues with the words

"And the days that I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days."

For me, until he distilled and articulated it, that was unconscious knowledge. However, now that I know the "trick," I try very much to have very good days even though I have high expectations.

I'm very lucky: I get the runner's high as I run, which leads itself to a profound sense of gratitude (but not quite in a drunken slobbering "I love you man" repeated ad nauseum sense).

This section contains entries for groups (and eventually individuals) that I'm thankful for. It's just shy of paralyzingly intimidating to start writing these entries, because it's going to take a long time and I certainly don't want any group or person to feel left out.

AGDG

I joined the Albuquerque Game Developers Guild in the middle of 2021, but before that I had known one of the co-founders for years and he's one of the friendliest people I know. Not surprisingly, the group he co-founded is also welcoming.

When covid hit, a lot of the Albuquerque meetups slowly died. AGDG has an active discord server and weekly remote meetings. I don't consider myself a game developer, per-se, but poker is a game and I am a developer, so I'm not a complete rando crashing their party.

AGDGAT

After the ADGD remote meeting finishes, a subset of members join for an accountability meeting. The premise is simple, each member briefly describes the work that member did in the previous week, specifically compared to the prediction that member made at the last meeting. Congratulations, sympathy, understanding and words of encouragement are provided and then that member makes a prediction for the following week. The predictions are tracked on a spreadsheet.

I'm enjoying this process, even though I've fallen short more times than I've exceeded my goals.

BARGE

The BARGE website explains what BARGE is better than I can.

I attended my first BARGE in 1994.

It was through BARGE that I learned about handheld GPS devices (thanks Patti and Bingo!), which got me into hiking.

When I needed to have a medical procedure done in San Francisco, two BARGErs (thanks Patti and Charles) put me up.

I ran my first mile (on July 22nd, 2009) in anticipation of the BARGE Fun Run. I even wrote email to a running friend of mine and told her that I had just run my first mile and I actually enjoyed it but that I hadn't caught the running bug (hah!).

BARGE members tested multibot, my first poker server and are actively using mb2, the poker server I wrote twenty years later.

I owe these people a lot!

Team RWB

Team RWB is a veteran's service organization that provides opportunities for veterans and the community to connect through physical and social activity. I first became aware of them when I saw people in Team RWB shirts helping a man navigate the Bataan Memorial Death March (BMDM) using a hand-cranked vehicle to propel himself. His legs didn't function, but his arms did and although I didn't know who they were at the time, it was clear he had a most excellent support crew.

When I got back to the hotel room, I web searched Team RWB and learned that they were open to civilians. Eventually I decided to join because my father served in the Air Force for twenty years and as an Air Force brat I went to a few years of school on base. I figured I had a bit of experience with the BMDM and perhaps I could help out some way.

Over the years our Albuquerque group has turned into a national chapter through the great leadership of many captains. I'm lucky to have found them and honored that they allow me to participate in their various activities.

GEORGE

My buddy GEORGE, who ALWAYS TEXTS IN CAPS, told me to write a book. I don't know if anyone other than he will read these pages, but it's an honor to do anything he asks me to do.