Yep – I’m just another one of those guys: a Buddhist web developer with more than a touch of Aspergers who likes to run long, long, long distances and finds particular solace in being alone (or with a close friend) in the mountains for hours and hours and miles and miles at a time.
Does that sound like anyone you know?
There’s a saying I hear: “The older I get, the faster I was”. I used to be a lot faster – very, very fast. I also used to be a lot younger. There wasn’t a gradual decline, either, but a complete stop. For 30 years I was an occasional-at-best runner who lived-life-to-the-fullest-and-kept-right-on-going-until-it-was-empty, which is a clever way of saying I had some bad, bad habits. One by one I’ve dealt with those over the last 18 years, and part of how I’ve done that is by heading for the hills.
This is a website about addiction, about Aspergers, about resigning from the rat race, about wide expanses of mountains and desert and how cleansing the pain that you feel in the last miles of a 100K or 100 mile race can be. It’s about how I got from here [shooting up picture] to here [AC100 buckle]. It wasn’t such an easy trip, but the pay-off is worth it.
As much as it’s a website about ultra running, addiction, and Aspergers, it’s also about all the things so many of us geek out on, like the history of the mountains – wild, wild west stuff – and trail guides. There’s also nutrition, wellness, meditation – just some of the things we need to keep whole while pushing both physical and mental boundaries in a somewhat lunatic quest to see just how good we can be, as runners, and as humans.