Sunday, November 27, 2011

Next race - April 2012


I've been feeling a bit lost since the Ireland race; a little ungrounded, unfocused, and unmotivated. Not meaning to sound like a whiner, but recently it's been the first time in a long while that I hadn't had a race or adventure in the concept/planning stage. I needed something to get me going again.

In 2008, my Finnish friend Janne Kankaansyrjä completed a solo run along the Camino Frances de Santiago de Compostella and blogged about it. Straight away, running this ancient pilgrim route was added to my personal "bucket list". And then earlier this year, my friends Christian and Ursula had reinforced the idea by buying me a wonderful coffeetable book of the route, which they themselves have walked during several trips from their home in Switzerland.

The third piece of serendipity is the organization of the third edition of a race along a French part of the route (the Via Podiensis) from Le Puy en Velay to the Pyrenees. An old friend from the now legendary Transe Gaule 2005, Patrick Bonnot, is the race organizer. The April dates of the race fit reasonably well with family plans (just after the birth of grandbaby #3 in March, for example). And so I am delighted to be preparing for another (almost) cross-country adventure. 730km (450 miles) in 12 days - my tenth country - following routes along which pilgrims have been passing for more than a thousand years. Very cool.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

A spectacular place we visited this week near Ft Sill. We climbed Mt Scott - here's the view of Medicine Park from the top...


...we cycled past buffalo roaming the prairie grass...


...and we ate a light lunch at the famous Meers Restaurant...

Saturday, November 05, 2011

Not running tonight





Location:Cain's Ballroom, Tulsa

Racing Miles

This morning my friend Matt was talking about Randy Ellis, a local runner who surpassed a very creditable 5,000 race miles during our Midnight Madness 50-miler in Tulsa this summer. He asked me how many miles I've run in races, which got me wondering...I don't keep great reliable records of such stuff, but I can account for at least 6,148 miles of racing:
* 4,819 miles of stage races;
* 319 miles of other ultras;
* 27 marathons and over 300 miles of miscellaneous shorter distance races, courtesy of athlinks.com (my new favorite running site).

Training miles? Absolutely no idea...but if I conservatively estimate 15 miles per week for the 30 years I've been running, I'd end with another 23,400 miles.

So I'm nearly at 30,000 miles. More than once around the planet. Whew!