Introduction to my Stories

Running the American River 50-Miler in 2008

For those who know me, I love to tell stories. Fortunately, I have also managed to live a life through which I have accumulated a few stories worth telling. While my daughters groan when the stories repeat, friends and colleagues have, over the years, mentioned that I really should share these with a wider audience. So now I have finally committed to doing so.

Well, several will focus on years of travel, adventures, if you will. They will include hitchhiking across the Sahara Desert and being stopped by the Algerian military, swimming between islands in the Indonesian Archipelago, Descending Mount Whitney in a howling thunderstorm, living and working in Niger, Germany and Romania, and jumping a freight train in Arizona.

It will include stories about how I became an ultra runner. I will publish race reports from some of my favorite and most consequential races such as the Miwok 100K, my first 100 mile race (Headlands 100) and one of the toughest races on the planet, the Badwater 135. It will also have anecdotes from training runs and hikes in interesting places with interesting people.

I will explore how I ended up on this path. How at 11 years old, without telling anyone, I climbed to Skyline Drive dead reckoning up the Shenandoah mountains off trail and coming head to head with a rattlesnake, setting off on an unplanned biking trip from Boston to Fall River at 14 and dealing with the death of my father and dropping out of high school at 16 (spoiler alert: I went back).

Throughout, there will be explorations of how I decided to try and live a life worth reading about, rather than one where I read about others. How I set myself up to be the person I want to be (mostly, still plenty to improve, but that too makes life worth living). I will explore how to balance the glory days of the past, living in the moment, and planning for the future (people tend to live only one or maybe two of these states, but I have found I really enjoy all three).

So why now? First, I just feel like there is something here worth keeping. My older daughter is fascinated by the lives of her grandparents and great-grandparents. This is my gift to her and any future family to know about me. Second, I have been inspired by two others to whom I would like to give credit.

Actress Sonya Walger has a podcast, Bookish with Sonya Walger. In it, she asks her guests, and by extension the listener, what five books most influenced your life. Two immediately came to mind: The Big Sea by Langston Hughes and Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes. The former led me on my adventures around the world, and the latter inspired me to run. I wrote to Sonya’s husband, Davey, a high school colleague, about some of my adventures inspired by these books. He responded that the stories I shared were interesting and that I should share them publicly.

Jen Deadrick has a Substack titled Dispatches from a Porch Swing. Beautifully written it delves into her observations into daily life. It deals with universal themes we all deal with, yet is so very personal that it really touches the soul. She uses this platform and, unbeknownst to her, showed me how I could get this done.

So, hopefully this has whet your whistle. I plan to get one out every couple of weeks. Enjoy.

This was originally published on Substach March 5, 2024.