Adventure

Anita and Derek had returned to Fort Collins after living in Hawaii for half a year, so what better way to celebrate than to return to the activity in which we first met: rock climbing. With the weather turning warm over the three-day weekend, we piled into Derek’s car and headed over to Boulder Canyon to do a few outdoor climbs. Continue reading »

Isn’t this the coolest mailbox ever? It is outside Western Engines & Transmissions on N. College Ave. in Fort Collins. If you look closely at the photo, the engine serves not only as a base for the conventional mailbox, but is a mailbox itself! It even has a flag attached to one of the exhaust manifold bolts that can be raised.

Here is another photo: Continue reading »

Recently I’ve been noticing cracks the size of the Hayward Fault in people’s windshields around Northern Colorado, and I wondered when my Audi TT’s would experience its first boo-boo. Well, it finally happened. On the way to Denver’s airport, a bunch of stones kicked up by a semi-trailer flew at my car including one the size of an orange. The last rock hit the windshield squarely in the center resulting in a dollar-coin-sized, half-moon-shaped bruise. Continue reading »

Count this as a race I’d like to forget or even be disqualified from. I had taken over the #2 position at Mile 2.7 and had second place virtually locked up with a half-mile remaining — but then I got hopelessly lost. Crying out “WHICH WAY?” in vain to the atmosphere, I turned around to see runners behind looking equally discombobulated. “Inexcusable,” exclaimed the #3 guy, referring to the non-existent course markings at the end. Ultimately, after darting down an embankment and climbing over a chain-linked fence, I found my way to the finish line, but only after I had lost eight minutes. Instead of finishing second in a PR 39:xx, I finished in 47:xx after an angry sprint to the banner.

Oh well, it was a charity event to abet illiteracy in India. And I got to see a bunch of ol’ pals. Four of them, in fact. Continue reading »

Considering all the excuses reasons Alyssa was coming up with to (unsuccessfully!) squeak out of the Race for Literacy, you might think she would have been perfectly content to stay inside with her legs propped up on a sofa while eating frozen yogurt.

“It hurts way too much to run on pavement,” she said, “and I don’t want to be too thrashed to do my weight workouts this week. I desperately need to get back to those since I’ve had to bail the last couple of weeks due to a really tweaky neck, and a back that I might have overdone something to in the yoga workshop, and then this week being so busy. You can tell I’m not so much of a runner anymore if I’m prioritizing my squats and deadlifts over a race.”

But no, you will never catch Super Woman lying still, plus Alyssa is the type of gal who’d wear a down jacket with flip-flops while enjoying that cup of cold, organic froyo. I.e., she doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense, but this may be one of the reasons all of her friends find her so endearing.

“How about the waterfalls hike at Big Basin? it’s 11.5 miles and strenuous…” Continue reading »

Even though his fame came before I was born, I was familiar with whom Frank Shorter was from the movies Prefontaine and Without Limits and Kenny Moore’s book Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. From Wikipedia I also knew that he was a Yale grad and had attended law school at the University of Florida. But what I did not know was that this living running legend lived in Boulder, Colorado, only 55 miles south of where I reside. For the last 40 years, in fact.

“I find that I am most productive in a place that suits me best,” he said at a presentation in the Chautauqua Center. Funny, that’s exactly why I had moved to the Front Range. Continue reading »