TAHOE CITY, Calif. — Well I apologize for the lag in posts but admittedly it’s been a busy few weeks.  Tuesday was my last day at my old job before I start a new one Monday.  My intention is to keep the topics on this blog entirely separate from my day job, so I’ll be as brief as possible about this but I have to say I have already received seven welcome notes from my new teammates and I absolutely cannot wait to start on Monday.  (And I should also insert here the standard disclaimer: the opinions expressed on this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of either my current or past employers).

I was actually very close to not writing this post today because I have intentionally made this into an extended detox weekend from any kind of work obligations or deadlines.  A blog post was simply another bit of added pressure, but I sat down this evening overlooking the twilight on Lake Tahoe feeling like I had to write.  So I am.

And this is as it should be.  Recently I’ve had an internal battle that I will call the “Happiness Battle.”  What is the Happiness Battle?  It’s the constant internal recitation of some form of “if I only had X, then I would really be happy.”  Sound familiar?  If so, you’re not alone.

Admittedly, I’ve played this game as long as I can remember.  “X” could be a job, any of a variety of material possessions, or even something perhaps more ostensibly meaningful like a personal relationship.  My knee injury has caused the most acute and most recent instance of it for me: “Everything’s great, if only that would heal and I could run 100 percent then everything would be perfect.”

But life doesn’t work that way.  If you’re seeking external validation for your happiness, you’re never going to find it. No matter how honorable the wished source of your happiness may be.

This is a lesson that it has taken me a long time to learn.  I’ve lived a blessed life so far but I’ve also happened to live in a number of places where “keeping up with the Joneses” is a way of life.  I wanted a better car, a better place to live, a better job, a better this or that.  Surely enough, however, once I upgraded in one of these areas, a new golden gizmo presented itself.

This is a vicious cycle that will eat you alive if you let it.  You’ll never be content, period. As a runner, this has meant for me preparing for the possibility that I might not be able to run like I hope to again.  I don’t expect this to happen, but I have to be prepared for that possibility.

How do I prepare for it?  I realize that my happiness (or inner peace, or contentment, or however you’d like to define it) has its source entirely within me.  It doesn’t come from running, even though that is something I enjoy doing.  It doesn’t come from my family, even though we are very close.  Instead of looking to others or to some assortment of inanimate objects to fill me with happiness, I take care of it instead.  And you know what the crazy thing is?  As soon as I decided on this, I had several immediate breakthroughs.  I landed the amazing new job.  I made some enormous leaps forward on my knee recovery and am now able to run up to 20 minutes.  A friend happened to be moving out of his apartment and the timing was perfect so I grabbed it.  Now my commute will be 20 minutes where it used to be more than 60.

Isn’t it amazing how all this works?  I could go on, there are other recent examples in my life to cite but I think I’ve made my point.  This is one of the hardest lessons to learn and some people learn it early; some never learn it.  I wish I would have learned it earlier.  But if you’re struggling with something right now that you feel is holding you back, let it go. Don’t let it control your happiness.  In fact, once you take control and decide to be happy no matter what happens, you’ll be amazed at the happiness-inciting breakthroughs that will suddenly come your way.

BONUS MATERIAL: I’ve been a mini road trip machine of late (scouting potential future racing locations!) and intended to do some travelogue-ing but in the meantime I have photos to share.  The first set below is from Eureka, Calif. (and the drive there and back), a town about 250 miles north of San Francisco on the Pacific Coast.  I had no idea what to expect there but my two cents on the place is that it has a very coastal Carolina feel but with a northern California hippie twist and visible mountains in the distance.  The second set is from today’s Tahoe excursion and includes a few of my Jeep in its “natural” habitat.  You might also notice that I’m a train nut…

Until next time!

Eureka, California:

Tahoe/Truckee, California:

Stock photos by flickrized and lilit.

This is Part 2 of a two-part travelogue series on Lambertville, N.J. and New Hope, Penn., where I visited last week on a trip to the east coast. The first installation ran Sunday.

Continuing completely across the Delaware River brings you over the state line and into New Hope.  One of the best ways that I can describe New Hope is “Lambertville with a kick.”  Where Lambertville is sleepy, New Hope is vibrant.  Where Lambertville is muted (but by no means conservative), New Hope has an edge.  New Hope is just plain cool.

The Bucks County Playhouse, housed in a grist mill built in 1790 along a creek that empties into the Delaware

Taking your first few steps in Pennsylvania, you’ll pass by an ice cream shop, candy store, and a gallery or two before coming to the main intersection at Bridge St., where there is a Starbucks located in an historic building (the only major chain establishment in either town, with the exception of the Dunkin Donuts that just went up in the building across the street – hey, competition is competition, and this is America ).

New Hope is very similar to Lambertville in geography, though it’s a little bit larger owing to the flatter (but by no means flat) land on the Pennsylvania side of the river.  The PA side also has its own canal, the simply named Delaware Canal, which originates along the river in Easton but has been at very low levels since the aforementioned floods of ’03, ’04, and ’05 washed away its banks in several places.

Ferry Street in New Hope

New Hope’s architecture is every bit as charming as Lambertville’s, and the attractions that line its main street make it a popular stop for motorcyclists riding up and down the Delaware Valley.  Turning left off of Bridge Street into Main Street will take you past quaint shops selling everything from posters to used books and records to medieval-themed attire, to give you just a sampling of what you can find.  The smell of incense wafts out from more than a couple shops as you walk down the street.

About 300 yards down the road you’ll cross an old stone bridge over a stream emptying into the Delaware, alongside of which you can find the Bucks County Playhouse.  Housed in a large former grist mill built in 1790, the BCP is home to many local productions that you can take in during its spring, summer and fall seasons.  On the other side of the street is Logan Inn, one of the oldest continuously operating inns in the country (running since 1722) with excellent food and an enormous veranda where you can have a fine dinner while doing some fantastic people-watching from your elevated perch.

The Delaware Canal in New Hope

Further down the street are more shops, tattoo parlors, and bars.  Havana is one of my favorites, with great music on the weekends and its own enormous patio from which to people-watch and enjoy the amazing weather in the summer.

Heading back to Bridge Street and up the hill away from the river will take you past more shops, a not bad pizza parlor and little Italian restaurant called Villa Vito, and up to a railroad crossing.  In case you don’t already know, I am a nut when it comes to trains.  Since a young age, I’ve been fascinated by them, whether they were toy trains or the real thing.  Insert a railroad into any geographic place and it instantly becomes more appealing to me.  That New Hope has its very own only makes me love the place that much more.

New Hope train station

Once a real working railroad, the New Hope & Ivyland Railroad now operates as a tourist line.  Trains depart on a regular schedule from the station in town, south through the hillsides, across trestles, and over streambeds for several miles before turning around and heading back.  The trip is often full of kids with an utter inability to keep their voices low, but I love it anyways.  When I’m not riding the train, I’m wandering into their rail yard after (or perhaps during) a run, where old rolling stock (engines, passenger cars, cabooses) from the past 100 years hang out.  It is such a cool place.

Bordering the rail yard is the New Hope branch of Triumph Brewery, where I in fact hung out on Thursday evening, playing darts and hanging out with some great friends while listening to a surprisingly good blues band that ironically didn’t play enough blues.  Triumph has a location in Princeton as well and I’ve grown to love it over the years.  Being a microbrewery, its biggest draw is of course beer.  But the food is also pretty good, and it’s a great hangout.

New Hope & Ivyland Railroad

In many other ways the character and feel of New Hope is very similar to Lambertville.  I love driving up the Jersey side of the river, and the Pennsylvania side is no slouch, either.  There is a similar sense of wildness, with an occasional horse farm intervening into the scenery.  About 10 minutes north of New Hope on Route 32 is one of my favorite driving spots along the river, where the road gets extremely narrow and literally stops at a stop sign in someone’s yard, between their stone house and stone barn.  You can only imagine that this was perhaps a tavern centuries ago where river travelers overnighted on the journey between Easton and Trenton.

Bridge over the canal

One of the reasons I love the Northeast is that it is filled with places like this, where a sense of history rules and nary a strip mall, fast food or chain restaurant will ever see the light of day.  In the seven years since I first discovered this place, I’ve been mesmerized by its charm, its history, and what I can describe as nothing less than a magical feeling when you spend time here.  Walking down the old streets, the realization envelops you that you’re in a special place.  So if you’re ever in the Princeton area and have a half day to spare (or more), do not leave without heading up Route 29 to Lambertville and New Hope.   You won’t regret it.

Photos by Florian Dreyer, Tony the Misfit, Joe Shlabotnik, slgckgc, and sneakerdog.

I sat down to write this post on Friday in Lambertville, one of my favorite towns on the Delaware River.  Lo and behold, four pages and 2,200 words later I realized I had an epic travelogue on my hands.  It’s my hope that I’ll be able to post travelogues like this on a semi-regular basis – oftentimes these will be places where I have run, lived, or otherwise visited in some fashion.  I’ve broken these up into two parts, so you get Lambertville today, and tomorrow, New Hope.

While attending college I was a full-fledged member of what many people call the “Princeton Bubble,” which they characterize as having an extensive knowledge of everything that exists within a 1-mile radius of the Princeton campus, and extending along Route 1, I-95, and the New Jersey Transit rail line between Princeton and Penn Station in New York.  And that’s it.  Being an explorer myself I would like to think I ventured beyond the bubble a bit more than most, but in reality my college existence was primarily concerned with those places most often visited by other Princeton students like myself.

The D&R Canal towpath in Lambertville

After graduating and a brief stint working in Lansing I returned to Princeton for three years where I lived on the very edge of the township and taught high school and coached cross country and track in a neighboring community.  I began to meet and work with people who had grown up in and spent their entire lives in the greater Princeton/Trenton area, and instantly I discovered how much I really had not seen during my years as an undergraduate.

One of the great treasures of the region that I discovered was the Delaware River valley, and in particular two neighboring towns connected across the river by a two-lane, steel girder bridge: Lambertville, on the New Jersey side, and New Hope, on the Pennsylvania side.

I love these two towns.  Admittedly, the average teenager would likely find them incredibly boring but from the moment I spent my first day here, it became a place that I came back to again and again until I moved away from New Jersey, and have returned to again and again since then (in fact, I’m sitting in Buck’s Ice Cream and Espresso Bar on Bridge St. in Lambertville writing this blog post right now).

Lambertville, N.J.

Approximately 20 minutes north of Trenton on Route 29, and 15 minutes north of the spot on the Delaware where George Washington crossed with his army to surprise the Hessian mercenaries in Trenton on Christmas night in 1776, Lambertville comes into view on the Jersey side of the river.  Perched between the river and a high hillside that comes to an abrupt stop at a steep cliff, the town extends for about a half-mile from south to north in a narrow strip, with the 180-year-old Delaware & Raritan Canal bisecting it down the middle.  In the early part of the twentieth century, a rail line ran alongside the canal and stopped at the town’s train station, which today exists as the Lambertville Station restaurant.

Lambertville Station Restaurant

Today the railroad right-of-way and canal towpath are a part of a 23-mile long trail system that hugs to the river and that you can traverse from seven miles north at Bull Island all the way into downtown Trenton.  I have run along every section of this trail and it’s one of my favorite places on earth to run.

Lambertville was first settled in the 1700s and many of its buildings from the 1800s are still standing.  A walk down Bridge St. makes you feel like you’ve stepped back in time, with the historic buildings that grace each side of the street and the quaint look of the small mom ‘n’ pop storefronts.  Lambertville House, in the center of town on Bridge St., is a historic inn where presidents have stayed (and me too, but I’m not in their informational pamphlets).

Bridge Street in Lambertville

Venturing off Bridge St. you can find the Inn of the Hawke restaurant, one of my favorite restaurants anywhere for its food but especially for its atmosphere – when you walk in, you’re greeted by the centrally-situated horseshoe-shaped bar, and the dining rooms surrounding it are dark-paneled and candle-lit and each features its own fireplace (or two).  The large Victorian-era house that houses the restaurant also features a fieldstone patio, which is candle- and torch-lit in the summer and an amazing place to eat dinner and have drinks.  And while you’re at it, one of the neighborhood cats might just stop by and say hello.

Around the corner from Inn of the Hawke is Swan Bar, a one-of-a-kind establishment with historic paintings, trinkets, figurines and furniture covering every open space once you step down into the bar from street level.  Also notable is Ota-Ya, a place I haven’t eaten at in years but its sushi rivals some of the best I’ve had on the west coast.

Venturing north of Bridge St., you can wander into galleries, marvel at St. John the Evangelist Church, or sample some fine microbrews at River Horse Brewing Co., located right along the river.  In my opinion the most impressive homes in Lambertville are on the few blocks just north of Bridge St., many of them stately Victorians impeccably maintained by their owners.

The Delaware & Raritan Canal and towpath north of Bridge St. in Lambertville

Following the canal towpath north you’ll run by Lilly’s on the Canal, an elegant restaurant that looks out on (you guessed it) the canal.  In the summer, they have an outdoor patio as well, with an atmosphere similar to Inn of the Hawke’s that you can take in while the D&R Canal flows silently by.  Heading further north on the canal you’ll pass by an old, forgotten canal lock, and several of the most unique backyards you’ll ever see.  Each one has its own character and charm, from the small, short lawn full of clutter with short fences, to patios lined with tiki torches that burn into the evening.  I’m never able to walk past here without wishing I was the lucky owner of one of these homes, where ducks often wander up out of the canal looking for handouts, or simply a good place to rest.

Night view across the Delaware toward New Hope

Heading further north past the edge of town, you’ll cross under the highway bridge for Route 202 before the scenery turns wild.  This is the Delaware as it was ages ago; indeed, it hasn’t changed much in the last two centuries.  The canal banks are covered with trees and foliage that in the summer floods your eyesight with infinite hues of green.   Occasionally an old stone house, likely built in the 18^th or 19^th centuries, will appear off of Route 29, before it’s back to nothing but you, the canal, the road in the distance to your right and the river off to your left.  I love running here.

Venturing back toward the center of town, and approaching the river itself, the first thing you notice is how calming it is.  The Delaware, I’ve always thought, is the ideally sized river.  It takes about 10 minutes to walk across from one bank to the other, a distance of about a quarter mile at this particular spot along its course.  It’s not so small that you would feel obligated to call it a large stream, or a brook, but it’s not so large, like the Hudson near Manhattan or the lower stretches of the Mississippi, that you can’t feel any connection to the other side.  It’s the kind of river I would want to live along (though situated high enough to avoid the river’s floods, which it produced to historic proportions in 2004, 2005 and on my birthday in 2003).

Walking across the bridge, you can look north, where the first ridges and foothills of the eastern edge of the Appalachians begin to make their footprint known.  Looking south, more ridges, one of which is home to Bowman’s Tower, a lookout point serving as a monument to George Washington and offering panoramic views of the valley.  The word that always comes to mind for me when staring out at the Delaware is serenity.

To be continued…

The Delaware looking south from the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge

Photos by aturkus.

This is the fifth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.

Let me start out by saying the past two days have been days of good news.  My knee is feeling as good as it has in a while, I received some positive news on the personal finance front and a great friend landed a great job yesterday, all of which make me very happy.

I’m also due for the next installment of my injury tale so without further ado, here is where the story gets interesting.

I returned home from Germany on the most miserable plane ride I have had and firmly believe I probably will ever have.  Having no immunity to any German cold viruses, naturally I caught one.  And I caught it about five minutes before I boarded my flight.  With no opportunity to take any medicine, nor procure any tissues (I would speak the word Kleenexes here but it feels funny writing it), this was not a fun experience.

I survived, however, and a few days upon returning to San Francisco returned to see Nicole for my next PT checkup:

“How are things going?”

“Eh, about the same.”

“Any new issues?”

“Nope.”

Sheepishly, I denied any outlawed running, and I think she believed me (it’s possible she saw right through me, she’s sneaky).  After all, my knee did feel fine the day after I iced it in Germany, and things were still pretty much normal now that I was back in SF.  One more PT visit down, things with my knee seemed to be progressing as they should, life was good.

Training log for May

Two more weeks went by, weeks in which I obeyed the no-running rule (you can view May’s training log overview to the right).  I also wasn’t doing my PT exercises as frequently as I probably should have but I was making noticeable positive progress each day so my incentive to do so was definitely diminished.

At this point I should break the chronological timeline and go back to the middle of March of this year.  My great friend Rob lives just outside of NYC and approached me with the idea of participating in the New York Ragnar Relay, a 182-mile relay race that starts upstate in the Catskills and roughly follows the Hudson River south before finishing in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, where I ran a few times during my very brief collegiate running career.

Having just come off a rough week, I was eager for the adventure and said I was in.  I bought my plane ticket, and added New York and the race date, May 15-16, to my very busy spring travel calendar.

Scene along the Ragnar Relay course in upstate New York

Fast forward now back to May.  Despite my knee injury I was determined to run the relay – I had been looking forward to it for a long time, and besides, I knew it would be a ton of fun.  I never told Nicole it was on the horizon but it was there, in the back of my mind, an indelible date on my training and recovery calendar that Nicole, naturally, had no idea existed.

And my PT visits in the beginning of May proved promising.  In fact, the timing seemed to be working out perfectly: the Monday before the Ragnar Relays Nicole said I could start running.  The beginning of that week I was in LA for a conference for work, and I ventured out of my hotel the first evening for a 1-mile run.  A half mile out, a half mile back, and a grin from ear to ear: everything felt fine.

The next day, I added an extra half mile to the total, taking in a little bit more of the Simi Valley scenery.   And the next day, a whopping 2 miles.  No knee issues, and I was floating on air.  I caught the evening flight out of Burbank Airport back to San Francisco, switched terminals at SFO and hung out there for about an hour, then caught the red eye for Newark, the omnipresent plane noise accompanied by thoughts of the pending running adventure.

There are many Ragnar Relay events held across the country in places diverse as New England, Florida, Washington state, southern California, Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  The premise of each is the same: 12 team members run approximately 180 miles starting sometime on the morning of the first day, and finish approximately 24 hours later.  The teams split up into two vans of six people each, and while one van’s six runners are racing, the other six can drive ahead, and rest for their upcoming legs (this becomes especially important during the overnight legs).   The race is divided into 36 legs, three for each runner.  No two legs are the same.  Some are mountainous or hilly, some flat.  Some are more than eight miles, some less than three.  Some run during the day, and some occur at 3 in the morning.  The only consistency in the whole plan is that all 11 runners on your team need to run before you can run your next leg; hence if you start with leg 2, that means you also run leg 14 and leg 26.

The New York Ragnar Relay course: 182 miles from Kingston to NYC. My legs were nos. 8, 20, and 32.

My team consisted primarily of Rob’s co-workers and their acquaintances, most of whom were recreational runners.  I wouldn’t consider myself a professional runner per se, but I was a former high school and collegiate athlete, a former coach and a member of an ultrarunning club so by comparison I was among the team’s die-hards and earned the privilege of running the longest and most difficult legs of the 182-mile jaunt from Kingston to New York.

In April, before my injury, I was thrilled about my assignment.  After the injury, you can imagine I was a bit nervous.

But I wouldn’t know what was in store for me until that fateful day in May arrived.

This is the fourth article in a series describing my first ever running injury in 20 years, how I’ve dealt with it heretofore, and my path to recovery.

In my last injury post I detailed what happened to my knee, why it happened, and my physical therapist’s prescription for recovery.  Now I’ll share the beginning of my meandering (and still not fully traveled) road to recovery.

As I mentioned in my previous post, following through on the prescription of therapeutic exercises wasn’t as easy as listening to it, and then telling my PT Nicole that I would do what she was telling me I should do.  Prior to my injury I would run 30 miles in a heartbeat but you would have had to beat me just to get me to do 30 pushups.  If physical activity didn’t involve running, or any of a number of team sports like baseball or basketball, I wasn’t interested.

So the directive to perform a number of exercises each night involving odd body movements targeting muscles in areas I never knew I had them was not necessarily met with loads of enthusiasm on my part.  My first few visits to see Nicole I would dutifully report that I had performed all of my exercises in the intervening days when that was really only a half-truth, if not a quarter-truth.  The truth was that I hated doing anything that didn’t involve running.  And I’m sure Nicole knew.  But like she always tells me, “this is why I learned just as much about psychology in PT school as I did about physiology!”

The streets of Grossostheim

Nevertheless, my initial diagnosis was a moderate tear of my MCL, something from which it should only have taken me about four weeks to recover (with “should” being the operative word here).  The fact was, however, that I had a work trip to Europe planned to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich at the end of April and on the weekend I was going to be in Frankfurt I was planning to run the Marktplatzlauf (rough translation: Marketplace Run) 10K in Groβostheim, a little town not far from my company’s offices outside Frankfurt.  And no little MCL tear was going to keep me from running my first road race in Europe.

My friend Brandon had just moved to Frankfurt to spend in a year in our office there and along with one of our German coworkers we jumped on the Autobahn and headed out to Groβostheim for the race.  The town was quaint, everything you might expect from a western European countryside town, with its church steeple anchoring the central town square, and cobblestone streets that seemed to meander in every direction with no particular rhyme or reason.  It was a unique feeling: the juxtaposition of this historic town, a scene with which I was not at all familiar, and that of a typical road race, something that’s as familiar to me as apple pie.

I studied German for a year in high school and two years in college and like to think I can speak it with some level of conversational competency.  (For some reason, my German always seems to improve with a drink or two).  And after spending four days in France, an incredibly beautiful country but one whose language I am terrible at even attempting to speak, I was excited to have the chance to flex my German pipes (yeah, E-Trade commercial) in the land of native Deutsch speakers.

It was a little bit more difficult than I imagined, as native speakers naturally speak very quickly.  And with my limited vocabulary, I found myself ensuring I only spoke to people in German when I knew their answer would consist of words I would understand, such as “Where is X?” or “What time is it?” or “How much is that?” (I know, I must have been a thrilling conversationalist).  I didn’t know too many German words related to running other than laufen (to run), schneller (faster), langsamer (slower), or die Schuhe (shoes), so I pretty much kept to myself on the starting line.

The gun went off and my knee felt great.  As we turned one sharp corner after another I kept avoiding the cobblestones as much as possible to prevent any cobblestone-induced injuries.  Aerobically, it had only been about three weeks since I had last been regularly running so I was able to stay near the front of the pack for awhile.  I followed the leaders through the town scenes of what I imagined could have been a World War II-themed video game (except without all the blood and destruction).

My race bib

The course consisted of four 2.5K laps around the same loop, with each lap crossing through the Marktplatz twice.  After lap one I was beginning to notice a slight tingling in my knee.  After two laps I knew I had issues.  I was planning to peel off the course and finish with the 5K runners, who of course only needed to do two laps, not four.  No sooner was I veering toward the finish chute, however, when a nice little German lady noticed that my racing bib was color-coded for the 10K race and shooed me back down the street.  And, in my state of concern for my knee, I couldn’t at that moment quite come up with the words “My knee hurts, I have to stop.”

So I did one more half lap, where I conveniently blended off the side of the course into the middle of the crowd in the Marktplatz.  My knee was not happy with me.

Damn.

I was a little bit worried.  I arrived back at Brandon’s place in Frankfurt that evening and promptly iced my knee (icing: another activity I was never very fond of until this injury).  We then went out that evening to the Nacht der Museen (Night of the Museums), where all of the many museums (film and TV, natural history, aerospace, and so on) along the Main River in Frankfurt are open during the nighttime and have bands and open bars.  I definitely recommend it if you’re in Frankfurt at the end of April.

I woke up the next morning, and my knee, surprisingly, felt okay.  But I made no plans to run on it, and would not do so again for, oh, another two weeks or so…

The Marktplatz: Race start and finish

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