Race Day: Friday, September 8, 2017 – 8am I feel like I had been building up to this race for 3 years. I remember hearing about Superior as a lowly triathlete and being kind of mystified by the thought of a 100 miler, learning about Western States and other ultramarathons and thinking I’d never do […]
Read MoreRace Day: Saturday, July 29, 2017 – 6am With a race that has so much history and a legendary course, it’s hard not to derive some enjoyment out of the Voyageur Trail Ultra, even though it requires 50 grueling miles of running in the heat of the summer. On race week, all I could do […]
Read MoreRace Day: Saturday, June 17, 2017 – 6:15am It was fun to go back to the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon after running Grandma’s Marathon the past three years (2014, 2015, and 2016). Leading up to the infamous Grandma’s weekend in Duluth, my training was pretty good. I was running faster and stronger than ever, had […]
Read MoreRace Day: Friday, April 7, 2017 – 11:59pm Never in my life have I had such a perfect training block leading up to a race. I guess that is a bold statement to make, but I feel like there is always some sort of question or apprehension, some little nagging injury or training fall-out that makes […]
Read MoreRace Day: Saturday, October 15, 2016 – 8am I neglected writing about this race for a long time. It was a bad race. I’ve never fallen apart as badly as Wild Duluth 2016. I was undertrained and figured I could wing it. If you don’t put in the miles and race-specific intensity, you cannot wing […]
Read MoreAs I walked away from the future southern terminus of the Superior Hiking Trail, the Wisconsin border, finally done with the entire trail, I felt like the walking dead. My feet hurt bad, really bad. My shoes felt so uncomfortable, like walking on concrete slabs. My backpack was drenched in sweat and grime, and I […]
Read MoreGarmin Data: When my alarm went off at 3am, I hit the snooze button. Onto my very last day, but yet I still wanted to eek out that last little bit of sleep. I may have slipped back into REM sleep. Upon the next alarm, though, I started getting my things together. Pants on, […]
Read MoreWater is coming in. Not good, not good, not good. Oh, no!!! It was around midnight on my seventh night, and I hadn’t slept much. For three hours, I closed my eyes, drifting in and out of light sleep, nervous of the impending thunderstorm. In a half hour, it went from light rain, to thunder, […]
Read MoreGarmin Data: I woke up to my alarm early in the morning, but snoozed for an additional 10 minutes. I seemed to drift off again, even in the short period of time. Tim, the guy two feet away from me, was snoring still, sleeping flat on the ground, sleeping pad twisted beneath him and his sleeping […]
Read MoreGarmin Data: In between swatting mosquitoes, I drifted off to sleep in the early morning hours of my fifth night camping. An infuriating buzz in my ear canal would cause me to stir, but what completely woke me up was another round of thunder. The only precipitation I heard was left-over rain falling from the […]
Read MoreGarmin data: I woke up to rain in the middle of the night. By this fourth night, I found that an unobstructed night of sleep is not really realistic out in the woods. Each night, something stirring or a wind gust through the trees or a rock or root in my back would wake me up. […]
Read MoreGarmin Data: My alarm went off early, and I was on the trail in no time. With rain coming on the crux day, I wanted to get out early, and I was the first camper of perhaps 10 at the Springdale Creek campsite to depart. It was barely light out. I ate my four breakfast […]
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