Does this sound familiar? You enjoy [insert creative activity] but “don’t have time right now” to produce something really amazing, so you avoid working on it at all—because you are waiting for just-the-right-time to do it PERFECTLY. Because, of course, right now there’s all those emails to reply to, laundry to fold, errands to run . . . Important Stuff that you are an expert at, and so you fill your day and your sense of self with “at least I got something done today.” “Procrastination” is such a multi-syllabic word; I prefer to think of it as kicking the can of an imagined gloriously comple ..read more

Today was a great day for a 10k . . . and a PR, even! (10k = 6.2 miles; PR = personal record; a person’s best time at that event) That’s me (photo above) crossing the casual finish line this morning–no computer chip timing, just good old-fashioned NICE humans recording runners’ times. I had hoped to break an hour . . . but was this a pipe dream only a year-and-a-half after flying off a horse, sailing through the air, and landing with all my weight on my left foot in the dirt of a horse arena? Could I, did I, break an hour? (Cue suspenseful music . . . and cut to a new topic.) The race is call ..read more

Imagine this: you’re hiking along on a nice wide windy trail, chatting with your friend, when you round a bend and see a lone hiker wearing hiking boots headed toward you, looking happy, but you can’t stop yourself from blurting, “I could never do that! How do you hike in shoes?!” The lone hiker smiles, shrugs, and keeps going, but you can’t stop yourself from continuing to spout rude nonsense as they fade down the trail, “Did you see that?! They were hiking in boots! That’s gotta hurt!” That, my friends, is called a switcheroo parable. OK, maybe it’s not. (I made up the label.) But it should ..read more

A book-shaped package arrived in the mail this week. “Uh-oh. What did I order this time?” The surprise was that I did NOT order this book–it was a gift, a contributor’s copy of a new anthology that just became available today (April 1, 2023, but no joke ). Tales from America’s National Parks and Trails: Campfire Stories, Volume II, contains two of my (many!) Grand Canyon poems; they reside between the lovely covers of a book full of the writings of authors I admire. Cheers for editors Dave Kyu and Ilyssa Kyu for creating this wonderful book, and for Mountaineers Books for publishing it! My ..read more

Drought and more drought. Then, finally, winter rain. Welcome, welcome, rain, to Southern California. My feet have been waiting for you, for the mud and damp sand and best of all: puddles! But now people are giving me weird looks. Maybe they’re too polite to yell after my bouncing braid, “You’ll catch your death of cold!” For those of us of a certain age, this phrase was usually pronounced by a grown-up who was horrified by the sight of a non-bundled-up child (or a child-minded adult who “should know better”).  Puddle splashing (and the resulting wet feet) definitely triggered this warni ..read more

How’s that for a click-bait-able title? We’ll get to the spider encounter soon enough . . . but first: It’s cross country season! Here’s my youngest son running the Mt. SAC Invitational back in the late 1990s: He’s the kid with the shaved head in the middle (something about aerodynamics? He’s now a science teacher at Allyson Felix‘s alma mater.) And here’s my oldest son’s daughters running at Mt. SAC last weekend: They’re the non-identical twins in gray singlets and shorts. So that makes three generations of runners! It’s not even Thanksgiving, but there’s so much to be grateful for . . . incl ..read more

Kenneth Posner, age 59, lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he has been hiking barefoot since 2015; his many remarkable barefoot achievements include summiting the 35 Catskill High Peaks, the 46 Adirondack High Peaks, and 36 of the 48 4,000-footers of New Hampshire, as well completing the Catskills AllTrails Challenge, which entails covering every single hiking trail in the Catskills Park (total of 350 miles). This is a person who enjoys a good challenge! And even though it took three tries in the last three years, Ken finally achieved his goal of shoelessly backpacking California’s 210 ..read more

Five years ago this month I retired from teaching creative writing at a local university to help with this guy . . . . . . and to check a few items off my bucket list. (A worldwide pandemic was NOT one of those items, but I got it out of the way anyway.) Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try: Horse jumping! So much fun! So much to learn! Coming off a horse due to rider error! Not so much fun! So much to learn! As soon as I hit the ground–with all the impact absorbed by my suddenly akimbo left foot– I knew things were not good. My active life had changed in a second. The X-ray didn ..read more

January 2022, Irvine Park, CA Every January I like to toast with a post here, since this is the month (back in 2010, TWELVE years ago!) when the idea of being shoeless on the trails first struck me. In the early morning chill at O’Neill Park, standing at a birding-workshop campfire, I noticed a couple of shoeless young men on the other side of the flames. In my typical sad snarky fashion, I poked the arm of the person next to me and snickered some snide side remark about their lack of outdoor intelligence. Later that day, though, I couldn’t stop wondering about what I had seen. So . . . in my ..read more

I had a fun opportunity to test myself yesterday at the 30th annual Dino Dash–running and biking community events put on by the Tustin Public Schools Foundation. Since I’ve run a few October 5K races for comparison (the most recent in October 2019), that’s the race length I picked when I sent in my entry a couple of months ago. This immediately gave a new focus to my training–I needed to work on leg turnover. (I’d call it “speed work” but there are turtles out there moving faster than this granny.) It was crazy trying to get my feet to fly down the trail . . . more often than not, it felt lik ..read more