Recipes can be good or bad, their results tasty or terrible.  This particular Saturday morning recipe called for 3 hours of thigh-burning hill climbs, followed by an ice bath.  Not that different from baking a nice piece of beef for three hours, then tossing it in the freezer for a half hour.  Doubt you’ll find […]

It should have been a miserable run.   Steady rain forecasted, and it arrived on schedule.  My plan (ignoring the weather), was to run for three hours.  Met up with the Saturday morning crew in light drizzle.   Consensus route is the steady climb up Railroad Grade, then cut across to Mountain Home Inn.   Did my best […]

We are creatures of habit.  We shave our face in the same sequence every morning, order the same beverage at Starbucks, and walk the same routes.   These habits are accentuated in the morning, and play out during morning runs and rides.  On my Friday morning rides into the city, I can tell whether I’ve slept […]

Like clockwork each Friday afternoon, one of our running group leaders sends out a simple email:  “7:30 at Peets”, inviting any of the dozen or so recipients who are in town to meet at 7:30 am Saturday morning outside Peet’s Coffee at the town square in Mill Valley for a run of indeterminate length and […]

Got on my bike to ride to work as a full moon was just setting over our canyon.  Beautiful pre-sunrise ride in, leaving me with no choice but to stop several times to take pictures, generally feeding my Bridge obsession, capturing it at new angles or in different light.  If you could see my office, […]

Morning run along Cascade and then up Tenderfoot to the Cypress Trail.  The 3.5 mile trail crosses stream beds and through endless strands of pine and redwood, and angles back into and out of the corners of Cascade Canyon.  At times, the shards of sunlight shooting through the trees were magical, the trees on fire […]

Point, counter point.  Interesting article in the Times today about the Fitbit craze, measuring steps, sleep patterns, heart rate, etc.   There’s a fair point to be made that because of these tracking gizmos we’ve lost track of our bodies, and don’t know how to listen to them, to feel when we need to cut back, […]

Saturday run is planned to be long and slow, training the body to burn fat they say.   Two hours and forty minutes, climbing to the upper edge of Muir Woods, then angling over to the top of Cardiac, fog draping over the Dipsea trail running along the ridge down toward Stinson Beach.   Then reversing course […]

I could only ignore the Steps for so long.  The steps, the beginning of the Dipsea, and the mentally distressing midpoint of the Double Dipsea.  My trainer says it’s time to start running intervals on the steps.  So, in the 6:30am darkness that comes with daylight savings time, I ran five sets of intervals up […]

WIth leftover energy from all the drama of application day, I got out for 6:30 a.m. hill repeats on Railroad Grade. Railroad Grade is a looping dirt fire trail that in 1896 was a rail line used to take visitors to the top of Mt. Tam, a gain of 2500 feet on what was advertised […]