I’m back.

It’s been a while since my last post so a brief explanation is in order.  I started Running Buddy with the goal of the site becoming a resource for all things running, and I had big plans for it.  I still do.  But I made some mistakes getting started that I’m now thankful I have the opportunity to fix.

Saturday's St. Patrick's Day Parade in Hoboken, NJ. Needless to say, there was a lot of green (which I didn't have because I didn't know we'd be celebrating St. Patty's Day on March 6!)

In my pre-kickoff research for RB, I looked at other blogs and how they got started.  I dug into the archives of Get Rich Slowly, one of my favorite and most admired blogs, written by J.D. Roth.  J.D. started from scratch and today makes his living blogging and writing.  Not a bad role model, I thought, so I looked at the first month of his blog, April 2006, and discovered he wrote his first post on April 9 and had one or more posts almost every single day from then into eternity.

Not to be deterred, I set out to post every day.

That was my first mistake.  Blogging in this way is a little like dieting, in that you fight to stay consistent but it’s very possible to fall off the wagon.  I fell off the wagon in December and climbed back on today.  But without the self-imposed pressure to post every day, I feel a bit more liberated, more optimistic, and confident that I’ll be able to consistently—if not exactly every single day—be able to post here and make RB a site worth following.

Mistake Number Two was narrowly defining my site’s focus.  Now admittedly, “inspiration for running, fitness, and life” is not that narrow.  But I was feeling a little obligated at least to maintain a semblance of something running-related in each post and while running is certainly one of my muses, it’s not necessarily something I have the urge to write about every single day.  I need to broaden my palette here, if you will, and that’s what I intend on doing.

The goal here will still be to inspire and help people achieve great things, so “Running Buddy” as I’ve defined it remains a good title for the site.  And, as running remains a major part of my life (notwithstanding my lingering injury), you can expect to find plenty of running posts in the future.  But a lot of other great content will wander these pages as well.

The place where lived for three years in Princeton after graduating from college. (No, unfortunately I didn't own it!)

I’m on the road this week, traveling for work and visiting friends I don’t get to see very often in New Jersey and Philly.   I usually have more people to see than available time, and my trips, rather than opportunities for relaxation, end up turning into non-stop lists of activities that rival even my busiest days in California.  But plenty of moments of solitude do arise (such as now), which should give me a few good opportunities this week for new posts.

Yesterday I was asked to be the best man in the wedding of one of my best friends, and it completely made my day.  I’m so happy for him and his fiancée, and I can’t wait for the celebration.

In the meantime, I’ll be here, writing.  And hopefully giving you good reasons to keep coming back!

NFEC Runner with GGB in the background

Well, honestly, I don’t know yet.  But Edie over at the Trail Run Times has a great recap of last week’s 50-mile race during the North Face Endurance Challenge, which I wrote about earlier last week.

She has her date wrong (hey, if you had just run 50 miles you’d get your weeks mixed up as well), but does an amazing job of giving you the feeling of what it’s like to be running for more than 13 hours straight.

To give you an idea of how long that is, in the middle of December in San Francisco, that means you both start and finish while it’s dark outside. So far my longest run is the San Francisco Marathon coming in at a relatively brief 26.2 miles.  My next ultramarathon will be 50K (or 31 miles).   But someday I will run 50 miles!

Click the link at the bottom to read the whole story.

Is it easier to run 50 miles the second time? Maybe. But it’s still hard to run 50 miles. On Saturday, December [5] I lined up with my boyfriend Greg at the start of the North Face Endurable Challenge 50 Mile, more confident than I’d felt the prior two years. In 2007 we’d run the 50K, and in 2008 we’d ran the 50 Mile. This year my goals were to improve my time to between twelve and thirteen hours, and to be gracious to the volunteers and other runners. I’d joined The Endurables running club in 2008, and running with such fast runners (winners of races!) had been both humbling (wow, they are MUCH faster than me) and eye-opening. Eye-opening in that “the fast people” were so gracious to volunteers and their fellow runners. No one ever teased me about being slower (or if they did, they were way out of earshot when they did), and Brett especially seems to view a faster runner on the course not as a rival but as a potential training partner to recruit.

Our plan (analyzed to the nth degree) was simple. Walk the uphills, run the downhills and flats. The NFEC course is frontloaded with hills of the 8 “major” climbs, 5 of them were in the first 23 miles (Bobcat, Pirates Cove, Pan Toll and Matt Davis). If I could keep a good pace (but spare my legs), I hoped to cruise through the last parts of the course, picking off runners and making up time. This had worked well for us last year—we’d passed people starting at the Ridgecrest Blvd (mile 26) turnaround. I would eat a PowerBar GelBlast every 10 minutes and an S-Cap every half hour.

The weather all week had predicted a ~36 degree start, I felt very lucky it was a balmy 49. My coach, Jim Vernon and I had been talking about the revised course elevation. He found me at the start and strapped on his altimeter so he could get an accurate reading. He was rushing as he put it on at 4:58 AM—he hadn’t heard the announcement that the race was starting 15 minutes late. And then…we were off!

Click here to read the rest at Trail Run Times.com.

For many obvious reasons, Tiger Woods is all over the news right now.  What is unfortunate, I think, is that the salacious nature of the unfolding story is masking a broader lesson here that few people are bothering to consider.

Hero? Or human?

One of the dangers of putting all of your hopes and dreams into the hands of one person is that inevitably, at some point, that person is likely to let you down.  It may be a small letdown, as in a ‘you weren’t there for me when I needed you’ situation, or it may be a rather large one, as in Tiger’s case.  But none of us is perfect, which is a reality some have a hard time accepting.

Among many others that I will share in due time, I have two strong beliefs: 1) that man is fallen, and 2) that the world is not a perfect place, and no activist, actor, politician, or athlete will ever make it that way.  Tiger Woods was advertised as the savior of golf, and a saint of professional sports.  But that’s a lot of weight for a mere mortal to carry.

There’s nothing wrong with having heroes.  I certainly have mine, and they have inspired me to do positive things I would otherwise probably not have done.  But there’s a distinct difference between inspiration and worship.

Runners can fall victim to hero-worship, just like other athletes.  As a coach, I often told my athletes what Ned Brazelton, my high school cross country coach, often told me: “in this sport, you have to believe in yourself.”  The fact is that running is a solitary sport.  You can form some of the strongest friendships in your life with people with whom you regularly run, but at the end of the day, they will never run your race for you.  You have to want it for yourself.

In team sports, you win as a team, and you lose as a team.  Thus, no one can accept all the glory; neither can anyone shoulder all the blame.  The fact that running makes you responsible for your own letdowns is a scary thing.  But I also believe it’s one of the most empowering experiences in sports.

Running has a long history of heroes who have made the sport, and its adherents, proud:  Jesse Owens, standing up against the forces of fascism in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Roger Bannister, becoming the first man to break the 4-minute mile; Steve Prefontaine, capturing the hearts of and inspiring an entire generation of Americans to put on their shoes and start running.

But none of these people were perfect.  It was Charles Barkley who, in a Nike commercial from the early 1990s, said: “I am not a role model.”  I remember seeing that as a high schooler, thinking it was an arrogant thing to say.  But there’s some wisdom in the remark.  Barkley was warning his audience: don’t put 100 percent of your faith in me, because I might just let you (and your kids) down.

Remember that as a runner, you can turn to others for inspiration, and some can even motivate you to do great things.  But at the end of the day, it all comes down to what you have in your heart.  Do you have the will to succeed?   Do you have confidence that you can tackle anything that comes your way?  Trust yourself, and you’ll be amazed by what you can do.

The GGB, looking north toward Marin

In a handful of my posts thus far I’ve alluded to the Marin Headlands, the amazingly beautiful stretch of hills and mountains jutting out at the southern tip of Marin County separating San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.  If you’ve seen any of the gazillions of photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, the jagged landscape you see on the northern side of the bridge is the southernmost point of the Marin Headlands (on the other side of the bridge is San Francisco).

I love living in Marin County, even if it means extra commute time into San Francisco every morning.  There’s no doubt that San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but to live in Marin is, for an outdoorsman, to live in Heaven on Earth.  There are mountains, hills, Redwood forests, the ocean, the bay, sandy beaches and beaches with rocky cliffs.  When I was younger, I always said I wanted to live somewhere where there were both mountains and the ocean.  Well, this place fits that bill.

I went for a walk today from halfway up Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in Marin County at 2,460 feet.  It was a 5.6-mile loop that I first ran (when I could run on hills) with the Endurables last year, in a morning fog.  At that time I could see a few yards out on each side of the trail, and imagined the scenery might be nice, but the condensing water vapor declined to offer the opportunity to view it.

Today wasn’t a perfectly sunny day, but it was clear enough to see miles in every direction.  I could see the Farallon Islands, 27 miles off the coast, and Point Reyes, 20 miles north, as you’ll see in some of the photos below.  Below the photos is a video I took of the panorama.  I miss being able to run these trails on a regular basis, but it motivates me even more to focus on recovering so I can get back out on them soon!

(For those familiar with the area, the walk went from the Rock Spring parking lot on Mount Tam, down the Cataract Trail, up Laurel Dell fire road, down Coastal Trail, down Matt Davis trail, and up Old Mine Trail back to Rock Spring.)

To see all 37 photos taken on the path today in an online photo album, click here.

View of Stinson Beach and the Pacific from 1,900 feet

Trail with Bolinas in the background

Trail with ocean in the background

View up the coast toward Bolinas with some rain falling in the distance

View from 2,000 feet south across the Headlands to San Francisco

View south toward Tiburon with San Francisco to the far right