I’m editing this page. (It’s a joke. If you don’t think it’s funny, that’s ok, my kids told me there are two kinds of jokes: the funny kind, and the kind I make.)
After hitting my goal of 200 miles at Across the Years and having a wonderful time, I’m looking at the coming year and trying to lay out some ultrarunning adventure plans.
After Across the Years my life got tipped ass over teacart when my Dad was first quite ill, and then in hospice, and then died.
The result was that I found myself horribly out of shape and way behind on my training goals. Paula and I ran at Capitan 34, a 34 hour race. Paula crushed her 100 mile goal. Given my out of shape and undertrained condition, I had much more modest goals, and between running laps for myself and pacing Paula late in her race, I tagged 44 miles - not a bad performance considering.
Not much work on our trails got done in the past few months, with the result that things are in sort of a mess and so eventually I’m going to be working to get all that straightened out.
I’m working on getting my book about the things I’ve learned from my adventures in ultrarunning up on this website. I’ve got a lot of thoughts that came up as I was running Across the Years so I probably need to write some new material to cover those lessons.
The big upswing in activity has been my participating in Parks on the Air. I’ve activated one park, made hundreds of contacts as a hunter, and I’d love to get out and activate more parks. The big question is when I’ll find time and good weather to get out there.
One nice side effect of my POTA efforts has been a renewed focus on CW. I’ve been hunting activations using CW with some success, and my skills have been improving constantly as a result. I’m still studying CW, with a goal of doing POTA park activations using CW and a QRP radio.
Despite my struggles training before Across the Years my wife and I had a wonderful time running the six day event - Paula finished with 317 miles, second place female and 8th overall, a much better finish than I eked out.
So far this year I’m focusing on setting Hamster Endurance as my A race.
I’m writing a book (working title “Lessons from Ultrarunning”) about what I’ve learned in the process of going from lying in bed with a broken leg to the finish line of a 100 mile ultramarathon. If nothing else, this is improving my writing.
I’ve acquired a Logosol F2+ chainsaw mill, and so my focus right now is on getting up to speed with milling lumber, and then using the lumber generated to build several simple outbuildings, including a carport to shelter the Polaris Ranger and several woodsheds.
Work on boardwalks and new trail building continues as time permits.