Looking Back at 2009

Baby Dylan - highlight of the year

So that was 2009 - what a fantastic year!!! For me it was neatly divided in two by the arrival of baby Dylan in July. He was certainly the highlight of a year that was full of fun, excitement and adventure.

2009 started for me at 2am on New Years day when Sharpie and I drove up to Kingwood for the Texas marathon. I enjoyed the huge medal and boosted my confidence with a fast run which set me up for a great 100k run at Bandera the following week.

But all of this was part of the build up to my first 100 miler at Rocky Raccoon in February. I got lucky and everything came together on the day. I went out fast, enjoyed the challenge, kept smiling and finished within 5 minutes of my ambitious pre-race time goal. My friends Clea and Meghan were there at 2am to see me cross the finish line and I'm so glad they were able to share my best running moment of 2009 (plus they really looked after me after the race).

What surprised me most was that running 100 miles really didn't take that much out of me - I had another fast run in less-than-perfect conditions on the beach at the Surfside marathon a week later, and at the Seabrook marathon and a half in March.

Nestled between those last two marathons was the Texas Independence relay which consisted of a weekend of running and drinking with 10 buddies in early March. We had a blast!!!

Looking back, January through March was the peak of my running year and I don't think I ever ran as well as this again.

Part of this was due to the Texas heat. By the time I started training for the Cactus Rose 100 miler we were accelerating into a record-breaking summer. I'd picked up a posse of friends who I ran trails with on Monday evenings, and I regularly added on 10 miles of "character building" hills after our trail runs. It was hard work in some brutal conditions, but I kept pushing and telling myself to remember these nights when I felt like quitting at Cactus.

Despite this, I struggled at the Hells Hills 50 miler in June. I wilted in the heat and finished severely dehydrated, though I somehow managed to take 6th overall.

And the long hot summer continued into July when I "celebrated" turning 36. But more importantly it also saw the big event of the year as Nancy, Gavin and I welcomed baby Dylan to the family.

If I'm honest, this is the point where running really dropped down the priority list. Sleep deprivation didn't help, and for some strange reason I'd also signed up for three 60k races in the hottest August on record. The first turned out to be 7 miles too long, the second I will always remember affectionately as "the race with the crazy guy", and the final one I just completely lost it and barely managed to finish.

Somebody please kick me if I indicate I'm going to sign up for them again!!!

September saw most of my training runs done on the hills of the St Eds trails and the roads of downtown Austin. The highlight of the month was our relay team retaining our title and the Governor's cup at the Silicon labs marathon relays.

In an effort to round out my running prior to Cactus Rose on Halloween, I signed up for a marathon on each of the two weekends before it. The first was in Alpine, West Texas and we enjoyed a wonderful family vacation in the Davis mountains. Then a week later I ran the incredibly fun Frankenthon Monster Marathon at Brushy Creek near Austin.

Then it was the big one - Cactus Rose. Although I'd completed a 100 miler earlier in the year, I was irked by the suggestion that it was "an easy one". By contrast, Cactus Rose was anything but - it was the big bad beast, full of technical trail, steep hills and my training was nowhere near where it should have been going into it. But I finished, did the whole thing solo (no pacers or crew), didn't once consider quitting and was within two minutes of my predicted finishing time.

I'm proud of myself for that.

The race did take a toll however - it was over a month before I could feel my toes again, I had a hard painful lump on the back of my heel that took a similar amount of time to go, and I'm still bothered by some hip pain from it.

But it's a sweet finisher's buckle.

In December I hit my other goal of running over 2000 miles in 2009 and finished up the year at 2030. And while my running has definitely tailed off dramatically in the last two months, I am thinking up some challenges that will hopefully see me coming back strongly in 2010.

More details soon.....

So Happy New Year to everyone, and here's wishing you the best for 2010. As for me, I have another 2am start tomorrow to go run the Texas marathon again. This time I'm driving up with Nancy who's doing the half.

Does that count as a date?

Christmas on the Trail

On Christmas Eve last year I went for a run in the woods with two pretty girls and came home without my wedding ring (though it's nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds). This morning I ran at Bull Creek with hurricane Tanner, who's training for Bandera and fuelled by his promise to "give you a good ass kicking, you smart mouthed Welsh f#$@er" (which is kind of ironic since he's the only person I know with a smarter mouth than me :-) ).

So I devised a route that started off wading through the freezing creek and then went straight up Blue Blazes, looped back down then did the switchbacks backwards (so they were all uphill) before reversing the usual route and finishing with another splash across the creek. It was a beautiful morning and a great way to kick off Christmas Eve. The sun was shining across Forest Ridge as we got to the top and we had the entire trail to ourselves. It's the first time I've been on trail in weeks, and I enjoyed myself.

The rest of the day will be spent listening to Christmas music and cooking - I love Christmas Eve because it holds the promise of so much fun to come tomorrow.

Oh, and after the high winds and storms last night I need to go outside and fix our Christmas decorations that were blown every which way.

Merry Christmas everyone!!!


PS. while I enjoy Christmas music for the most part, there are some Christmas songs that are just completely annoying. I think the worst one is "Santa Baby" - I could put my foot through the radio every time it comes on!!!

Hardware, Humbugs and Ho Ho Ho

Wow, it's been a while since I posted anything here - I guess I've just been so busy this past week that running has really taken a back seat (if I'm honest, it's taken a backseat ever since Cactus Rose).

But I feel really fast today. That's because I'm typing this on the spanking new computer I just built. I realized a few weeks ago that my home desktop was older than Gavin - I built it back in 2003 or thereabouts - so it was definitely time for an upgrade. Installed a 64-bit version of Linux on it and I'm flying - really notice the difference when doing graphic design.

It's funny - I've built a few computers in my time, but I still hold my breath whenever I switch them on for the first time.

But enough about the new computer. Last weekend we went to see the movie Invictus which I had such high hopes for. Sadly it was painfully awful - the characters were one dimensional, wooden and shallow, there was very little flow and the rugby scenes were painfully badly recreated. Very disappointing.

Much better was the "Christmas Carol" we went to see midweek. It was Gavin's first trip to the movies, and what better place to take him than the giant screen of the IMAX 3D. I'm not much of a Jim Carrey fan, but I must say he did an excellent job here. The movie was a lot darker and scarier than I'd expected, and there were numerous moments that made you jump (especially in 3D), but Gavin loved it. He's been going on about Scrooge ever since. I've tried to explain to him that Bob Cratchett was really a nare-do-well who spent most of his day operating as a tealeaf (pickpocket) and running from the rozzers (police), and that within a year of his transformation Scrooge had spent all his money, been evicted from his house and was breaking coal in the poorhouse.

But he's not having any of it (and rightly so)!!!

So yesterday we took the boys to get their photos taken with Santa at the mall. Malls are a very strange place - full of teenage boys wearing jeans so comically oversized that you wonder how they defy gravity and stay up, and teenage girls wearing jeans so tight you wonder how they ever got into them in the first place!!! I haven't been to the mall for a long time (since we took Gavin to get his photo taken last year in fact), and I always get the impression they're like a relic of the 70s and 80s - tired, faded and just about hanging on.

But we got the photo taken (the first with both our boys), and the Santa was really good. I was looking forward to hearing what Gavin had to say after he quizzed him at length last year. He didn't disappoint, and it was well worth the wait.

Santa : So have you been a good boy this year?
Gavin : Not really, but I think I should get points for being honest.

Yes he has moments (sometimes entire days) where he really pushes my buttons, but I love it when he comes out with things like this - he's so chock full of personality and energy I wouldn't want him any other way.


Anyway, here are a few Christmas tips - if you're looking for some seasonal music, you could do a lot worse than check out Amazon's 25 days of free - one free Christmas song each day until Christmas Day. Some of the songs are really good, some are really bad, but my favorite by far is "Mr Heatmiser" by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. I've been singing that sucker for days now.

And finally, we were at Toys 'r Us on Saturday night and I couldn't help but notice all the Tiger Woods action figures in the clearance bin.

Poor Tiger!!!

Running into the Noughties

Mile 14 of a run is usually not that significant, but at that point on this morning's 25k run I passed a nice little personal landmark - 2000 running miles for 2009. Having beer and pizza at the end of the run was a bonus on a wet and miserable morning.

This evening, my parents are babysitting so I can take Nancy out on a date (for the first time by ourselves since I don't know when). We're going to dinner and a movie, the movie in question being "Invictus" - a study of Nelson Mandela and the rainbow nation during the 1995 rugby world cup held in South Africa.

Americans are probably unaware of the rugby world cup, but everywhere else in the world it's huge. It is staged every 4 years, and I have very fond memories of that particular tournament - probably the best rugby world cup to date - so I'm very excited to be seeing this. Nancy is also excited because she's always had the hots for Francois Piennar (the South African captain of the time).

Back then I was living in Worcester, England and it was a magical month of rugby, with all kinds of dramatic twists and turns, and a fairytale ending. Some the images - in particular Mandela wearing Piennar's springbok shirt - are truly iconic.

As you can tell, I'm looking forward to reliving some of those moments.

Dirty old Day at Decker

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning, and was so unmotivated to run the Decker half marathon. This was compounded by the fact that it was cold and rainy - a real dirty old day.

Last year we had much better weather, I ran the whole race with Clea and we treated it as a recovery run after racing Sunmart the day before. It was fun, we chatted the miles away and were finished before we knew it.

The year before I used the race as a speed workout before my first ultra the following weekend.

This year I had no illusions of running a fast pace, so I lined up by myself and just put my head down. I wore my long sleeved shirt from the Frankenthon marathon to keep the rain off my Garmin - I've destroyed far too many of them by running in the rain. I couldn't care less about my time, so other than starting it and stopping it at the finish line I didn't look at it once.

The race was very uneventful and really pretty boring - hills, rain, more hills, more rain - cold, wet, miserable. I finished in around 1:57 and was just glad to be done. I jumped straight in the car, put the heater up to high and headed home.

I feel much better after a long hot shower, so I'm going to build a fire, hunker down in front of it and make up a nice warming batch of my Guinness Irish stew for supper.

Sounds like a perfect way to spend a dirty old day.

Chilling out at the Texas Trails 50k

Trips to Huntsville are always interesting. I guess it's primetime hunting season right now as it seemed like almost everyone we saw in town was decked out in camouflage. I had to constantly suppress the urge to say "I can still see you" every time I passed one of them.

But I didn't want to get shot (and I wasn't sure if it was British season as well as deer) so I contained myself :-)

Last night it got super cold, so after supper we were glad to retire to a nice toasty warm hotel room. We awoke to a cold frosty morning, and got to the park just as dawn was breaking to find the temperatures were down to 22F. As if to make up for it, the lake was simply beautiful - mist floating across the water. Here are some more of the obligatory "misty morning" photos.

Smoke on the water - beautiful Huntsville SP

The race got going right at 7:30am. I had decided to wear just shorts and t-shirt as I knew I would warm up once we started running (and I did), but I did make a concession to the cold by wearing gloves (especially as I was carrying handheld bottles). The weather eventually warmed up into the upper 40s, and it was perfect running weather.

I didn't think there was anyone I knew at this race, but it turns out that quite a few people knew me. At the start line I chatted to Alan from Dallas who I'd met at the end of the Timber Knoll 60k over the summer. I'm glad he remembered me and it was good to visit for a while. We waxed nostalgic about "the crazy guy" from that race and then we were off.

22F at the start line

I seem to be missing the competitive edge I had last season. Maybe it's because I don't have any goals currently, or maybe my goals have shifted, but I'd decided I was going to run this one for fun and ignore the clock. I can honestly say that I really enjoyed just pottering around the park, chatting away with anyone who would listen and enjoying the surroundings. It was a beautiful day, and I finished an easy-paced run in 5:32:02 (36th overall out of 170 finishers), so not a bad effort.

Here are my highlights of the race.

I spent a large portion of the first (10k) loop chatting with Allen Darilek who I'd recognized from Cactus Rose. Our kids are right around the same age and we had a great time swapping stories.

There's about a mile to-and-from the turnaround that you run both ways. That means that you get to see folks both in front and behind you. As I headed out for loop two (the first of two 20ks) I was surprised that several people called out "hey there Welshrunner". I guess there are a few folks in East Texas who've read the blog. Whoever you were, thanks so much for the encouragement and I hope I replied or at least smiled. I seemed to spend most of the day smiling and talking, so chances are good I did :-)

It was good to see and chat with Daryl Lazauskas, who I'd run with at the Seabrook marathon back in March. I hope to see him again at Rocky and that he gets his 500 mile jersey.

Somewhere on the second loop I found myself running behind a young lady with an outstanding rear. It really was hypnotic and I guess it put me into a trance because a good few miles had passed before I snapped out of it (sorry Nancy - it's a guy thing).

The park was simply beautiful, and there was an abundance of fall foliage. As I climbed up onto the levee I noticed the dam had water flowing, and it caught the sun and glistened like diamonds. I stopped every loop to admire it.

There was snow on the trees, and as the sun came out it started melting which resulted in an amazing "summer rain" effect.

I spotted my family right at the end and I got to run the last few hundred yards and crossed the finish line hand-in-hand with Gavin (yes, we got quite a few cheers for that).

Gavin and the "big leaf"	Heading to the finish line

Tomorrow's the Decker half marathon, so another early morning. In the meantime, here are a couple of finish line photos.

At the finish line with Gavin	Really nice finisher's sweatshirt

Snow in the Forecast

Do you believe in earth energies or ley lines? That there are certain places that you are naturally attracted to? If there are such things, then Huntsville State park is one for me. I ran my first ultra there, first 50k, first 50 miler and first 100 miler. Whenever I go there I feel at peace and at home - it's my favorite place to run and I have some great memories.

So I'm excited to be packing to head up there for tomorrow's Texas Trails 50k. Not just because it's the first time I've been back since the Rocky Raccoon 100 miler back in February, but also because there's the possibility of snow. And I've never raced in the snow.

Still going to wear shorts and t-shirt though.

It's funny that this time last year I was peaking and about to smash my 50 mile PR at Sunmart. This year I'm just getting over the sinus cold that's been dogging me for the last few weeks, and my running has definitely tailed off since Cactus Rose, so I'm not expecting to break any speed records tomorrow. On the other hand I always run well at Huntsville, so we'll see.

Whatever happens I'll be sure to enjoy myself. And that's what really counts.


PS. my pacing services for the Rocky Raccoon 100 are still up for grabs. A few of you have enquired, so if you're still interested let me know and we'll work something out.