DaCrizzow

   Finally a good run. about 16 miles, temps in the 50's and pouring rain. really beautiful. the last several weeks have been really "uncomfortable." between a pulled calf muscle and a lower back issue it's been both a literal and figurative pain in the ass. getting back on track with my sleep and diet along with a bit of stretching and working the rollers here and there have made a huge difference. I've felt so heavy and stiff for so long now that I had forgotten what it felt like to do anything other than a miserable death march through the woods. I had made my peace with it as I knew eventually it would go away but it's hard to stay motivated when your only progress is feeling "less bad" rather than "more good."    I think the focus on stretching and rollers have made the biggest difference but finally taking off some of the few winter pounds probably had a lot to do with it. I've been trying something new with my smoothies. I usual

    Finally, a good week with some good "results." started off kind of funky. I met up for a run with an old cycling friend I haven't seen in a couple years. Like most guys my age, he's pretty busy with a family, house, career, all that business so his training is pretty specific for upcoming races usually. Doesn't always have time to wander around in the woods trying to find himself all the time. I bring this up because as we have similar marathon times, my training tends to be lots of long, slow miles with as many big hills as I can find. While his tends to be shorter, faster runs focusing on intensity. Running with guys like this usually means I have to speed up. You might not think so but it's next to impossible to get speedy guys to slow down to my kind of pace. It just doesn't seem natural to them. Since I could probably use some speed/tempo work from time to time, I just work to their pace.     I was fresh out of work with about 8-10lbs of work stu

  When i was a racing/ training cyclist, every few weeks i would take a day and do a pretty thorough cleaning, lubing and general maintenance on my bikes. I would blast the radio in my garage, set up my tools, rags, lubes, degreasers and al that stuff and get to work. Most of the time it was cool, very zen and therapeutic. Other times it was just another annoying chore i had to do.   Eventually, my last couple seasons as a cyclist, i would just roll into the garage after a race or one of my long sunday rides with the team and would step off the bike then through the bike up on the workstand and start a quick routine of wiping it down, cleaning the chain, cassette, chain rings and taking care of any easy brake or shifting adjustments needed. Thus eliminating that one day set aside for maintenance, leaving it open for another day of riding. Or god forbid, some sort of "real life" responsibilities. This approach seemed to keep my bikes in much better running condition as well.

  I just recently watched Big Sur. Based on Jack Kerouac's book by the same name. I went through a pretty intense study of the "beats" a couple decades ago after stumbling on  No One Here Get's Out Alive.  the Jim Morrison biography in which it was noted how much an influence the beat writers were to him. To be honest, i wasn't even a Doors fan until reading that book. i didn't really get the big deal and I guess I'd only heard the "hits."   Like I said, I went pretty "deep" with the whole beat thing. Especially Kerouac. Not really sure why. A lot of his writing was way too intense for my 20-27 year old mind but it affected me none the less. I loaned On The Road  to a friend and a couple days later he disappeared. No one heard from him for several weeks. No one from work (we worked together), not his band and not his girlfriend of five years that he lived with. Then one day I came home from work and he was sitting on my couch in my liv

  Between my search for sobriety and running for hours and hours in the woods, i spend a lot of time thinking and talking about god, the universe, and the meaning of life. The best i can come up with for the meaning of life is, "to live." The meaning of life is to live. Get food, don't get eaten. And maybe as beings of a somewhat higher conscious, to also help others. Be it animals, the earth it's self or other humans. As far as god and the universe, i see no separation.   When I was about eight years old, i was taken out of class once a week and brought to a classroom with only about five other kids and we were taught evolution. Of course I didn't realize that's what we were being taught at the time but i do remember pretty much being on the edge of my seat listening to this. At one point while the teacher is explaining the big bang theory, one of the other kids, a little girl, interrupts and asks, 'I thought God made everything....'   Are you fucki