Lying flat on my back on the wet grass after the race, a guy behind me says, “That was hard as f&*#.” I smile and say to my sister, “What he said.” The previous afternoon, as JoDee and I previewed the final mile of the 30K/50K courses, she was tearful. My sister had injured her IT …
Category Archives: Running
Sisters, a Trail Run Along a Road, and Some Stuff About Gravity
Gravity. It’s not something most of us spend much time thinking about, including me, until this summer, when I read Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection But What If We’re Wrong? It begins (p 3), ‘Like most people, I like to think of myself as a skeptical person. But I’m pretty much in the tank for gravity. It’s …
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Traversing the Tursi Trail
A pair of butterflies (possibly Papilio rutulus) fluttered along beside me as I neared the Tursi Trail head along Donnell Road on Fidalgo Island a few weeks ago. As I began my hike along the dusty trail, a garter snake slithered off to safety. Thimble berries and trailing blackberries lined the primitive path during the first …
Rookery Dookery Dock
In a small patch of March’s Point in Anacortes is a big secret: a heron rookery, also known as a heronry. Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve claims, “The heron colony on March’s Point is believed to be the largest nesting area for Great Blue Herons in all of Western North America. Herons have nested at …
Leave it to Beavers
Hear that sound? It’s a call to action for North America’s largest rodent to make it stop: running water. Of all of the species of rodents in the world, Castor canadensis is second in size only to Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, the capybara. My curiosity about this creature began while I was running. During a morning trail …
Silver Falls Trail Half Marathon 2015
In August, my sister and I signed up for the November 8, 2015, Silver Falls Trail Half Marathon, my fourth and her first trail race. Registration for the super popular 1,000 participants race, in existence since 2010, typically fills up within an hour. We looked forward to the chance to run along the Trail of Ten …
Leavenworth Half Marathon 2015
Standing stock still at mile five, I knew I was in trouble. I’d already given up on the sub-8:00 min/mile pace I’d been training for the past few months. Now I was just trying to keep going. I inspected the neon pink headphones my sister foisted on me in the car on the way to …
“All That the Rain Promises and More”
A barred owl’s call lured me into the woods yesterday evening near Heart Lake in the Anacortes Forest Lands. “Who cooks for you. Who cooks for you all,” provides the correct pattern of this species of owl’s call, but it doesn’t do justice to the super soft, spectacular sound. I grabbed my camera and headed out …
North Beach, West Beach and Cranberry Lake at DPSP
There are several locations within Deception Pass State Park that a person could spend an entire day: Bowman Bay, Cornet Bay, and Rosario Beach (plus the satellite sites: Kikutali Preserve, Dugualla State Park and Ben Ure Island), but most folks wanting to check out the “4,134-acre marine and camping park with 77,000-feet of saltwater shoreline, and …
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Sage Hills Trails
During the safety briefing, I realized that my fire shelter had been breached. I had never been so scared. It was the summer of 1986, the year before I graduated from college, and I was one of a group of many Gifford Pinchot National Forest employees highly encouraged to volunteer to help fight forest fires …
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