"The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected" -- Robert Frost Preamble Full disclosure: this isn’t your typical race report. I’m not going to bore you with all kinds of factual information about the race and the course. If you want to know about each creek crossing and the exact GPS location of every rock on the route, I’m guessing that information is included in the 47-page-long race guide available on the race’s website (which I definitely plan to read… one day). No, this “race report” is more of a “love letter”. A love letter written by an aging runner who has accepted t ..read more

photo by Keshav Dahiya How to finish Western States on just 17 miles a week training “Personal trainers and coaches hate him! This 45-year-old man ran a sub-22-hours Western States on just 17 miles a week training using one simple trick! Click here to learn his secret!” Sorry fuckers, there’s no secret. You can chug proprietary blends of pickle juice and apple cider vinegar. You can wear neon compression socks and breath-rite strips. You can run in sandals… or clown shoes with carbon-fiber springs hidden in them. You can attach electrodes to legs and shock yourself while watching ..read more

** If you have no idea what the Barkley "Marathons" is, read this first!** Frozen Head freezes over! “Come to the South,” they said. “Enjoy the weather. Try some barbeque.” “Fuck dude, it’s snowing,” I yell to my buddy Peter as we pull into Frozen Head State Park, home of the Barkley Marathons, just days before the race. “That’s why I booked us a warm hotel room,” Peter chirps proudly. “With free HBO?” I inquire sarcastically. “With free HBO!” Peter beams. “And also, I brought edibles!” he adds. #FistBump But, it was not yet time to let our minds wander to the many untold amenities awai ..read more

Hardrock 100: Wild and Tough photo by John Burton Henry Ford… the inventor of ultra running? Henry Ford, the iconic American industrialist, is attributed with the rather elegant-sounding quote: “Failure is merely the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”  But technically, that’s not what Henry Ford actually said. Let’s not forget, Henry Ford was essentially a glorified car mechanic, not an English professor or statesman. What Ford actually penned was a bit more garbled and unwieldy: “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” Which sounds li ..read more

Net downhill, but not all downhill “You need to learn to puke while running,” my buddy Keith recently chided me after I’d posted on Facebook that I’d stopped to puke at mile 12 of my latest marathon. And Keith wasn’t necessarily wrong.   That unscheduled puke stop had wasted valuable seconds. Thankfully this time it hadn’t cost me, as I still managed to PR by almost two minutes (thanks to a 5,000-foot net downhill course and a 30-mph tailwind… more on that in a while). But next time… those precious lost seconds could potentially make all the difference. There is little mar ..read more

“Who are these people?” Sixty-seven year-old Steve Patt – a Silicon-Valley software entrepreneur and Harvard PhD chemist – doesn't immediately strike you as the type of lowlife who wakes up in the morning and slams a few beers before breakfast. Yet, there he was, sitting alone in his car in a deserted parking lot on Saturday morning, several cans of beer in his lap, staring expressionlessly out the window at the rain. “What am I doing?” he muttered. Outside Steve’s rain-covered window, a conspicuous-looking man with a large, full-back tattoo was pacing back and forth across the parking lo ..read more

Just a walk in the park... Manning Park photo by Riccardo Tortini The night before the the longest "100 miler" of my life "The beer here sucks," my pacer Riccardo and I blurt out in unison. We stare blankly at the meager list of macro-lagers, periodically flipping the menu and then turning it back over again, hoping a decent craft brew will magically appear. But no luck. In an act of total desperation, I even try turning the menu upside down... and then shaking it vigorously. I throw it on the ground and stomp on it. Still not a single IPA or Saison. Finally, whe ..read more

Ohlone 50K photo by Nina Giraudo Poets, drunks, and ultra runners The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas certainly had a way with words. "Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight... Do not go gentle into that goodnight." Ah good stuff! But my man Dylan Thomas (D-Thom for short) also had a way with Whiskey. And sadly, at age 39 he was dead. I turned 43 this month -- already somewhat of an old man compared to D-Thom who never had to suffer the indignity of sitting across from a birthday cake with 40 or more candles on it. And, as has been my tradition for much of the last 12 years, I chos ..read more

New 2016 finisher's buckle photo by unknown As a general rule of thumb, if you’re planning to attempt to run one-hundred kilometers through the mountains, you should probably do a fair bit of training. A lot of training! A metric shit-ton of training! You should put in months of high-mileage weeks. You should do obnoxiously-long emphatically-slow runs on the weekend. Maybe even a few back-to-back long-slow runs where you trudge along, on tired legs, so slowly that even your own shadow says, “f**k this, I’m gonna sit down and check my Facebook messages”. Or… you can do what I did and ..read more

Gold Strike Canyon Trail hike Five of the most-awesomest hikes in the world I haven't been running much due to a prolonged injury as I mentioned in my previous blog post. In fact, I've even thought about changing the title of my blog from "Running John" to "Hiking John", "Hot-Yoga John" or "Stationary-Bike Spin-Class John". But none of those titles seem to have quite the same ring to them.  However, since I have been doing quite a bit of hiking lately, much of it on spectacular trails, it gave me an idea. Why not write a series of posts about the "most awesom ..read more