Runalong

There are four major language groups in Switzerland, the smallest of which is found in the southeast part of the country between Italy and Austria. The language is Romansch and we found this to be an area of lovely towns virtually undiscovered by American tourists. Of course that meant that language was a bit of a problem but most hotel and restaurant folks spoke just a wee bit of English, so we got by.

It was our first, but by no means last, experience of detraining in a town where we had no reservations. I left the girls with our bags and wandered around Zernez checking for an affordable but decent place. The hostels were not up to our standards, but I found a nice, almost deserted, family run hotel for $40 per person per night (breakfast included). Throughout the trip, we never did have a problem finding an affordable place to stay.









Zernez is also just north of the Swiss National Park, the only national park in Switzerland, and the only area preserved in its natural state (most of Switzerland is given over to small farms and ranches or "alps", as they call them. It turns out that in its natural state, Switzerland looks a lot like California or Colorado. We took a bus and got out just south of the park; my faithful companions hiked back partway with me, including a summit, and then caught another bus back to town. I continued over another ridge and hiked back to our hotel thus successfully crossing the SNP from south to north. Woo-hoo!

I got snowed on, rained on, hailed on, blown around and saw an ibex and a herd of chamoix.

Who scares you more? Religious believers or the "new atheists"?

A professing non-believer makes the case that the latter are both more worrisome and less persuasive than the former.

As I said last week, some days I feel really good during my run and sometimes I feel old. The days I feel old are a harbinger of mortality and as such, are probably spiritually useful (silver lining and all that rot).

The days that I feel really good are spiritually useful also. For they are also harbingers, harbingers of immortality. When I'm running a long or tough course and all is clicking and I seem to be temporarily transcending my bodily limitations I get a three-dimension, all-five-sensual taste of what heaven will be like in my new sin-and-death-and-curse free body. It's one thing to know such things intellectually, but to actually be able to FEEL, coursing through my whole body, a sample of what that will be like is truly, in the most literal sense, glorious. And faith-building: it makes it a lot easier to rejoice that my real home is in heaven and that this world and this life will soon pass away.

Caveat: If you'd like to try this experiment at home- be forewarned: it takes a while to get there. But it's worth it.

My dad lives in Escondido, and has chronic lung problems, but fortunately he is in the midwest at the moment. The "Witch" fire has burned to within a few miles of his home but apparently hasn't moved much closer today. Most of the houses burned in Escondido are at the opposite end of the city. My sister lives east of San Diego, but hasn't had to evacuate yet.

Our assistant pastor, Bob, is a volunteer with the fire department and is currently in southern California with a Redding crew.

Prayers are appreciated, on all fronts.

Here's what it looks like from the satellite:

I've been feeling REALLY good lately. I wish I knew what caused it so I'd know what to do to keep it going. When I say that I've been feeling good, you have to understand that I never really know how well I'm feeling until I go out for a run.

Generally, I almost always feel pretty good. Not much detectable difference from day to day. But when I go out for my run, some days I feel great and some days I feel old and some days are average. I never know until I get out there.

The last two months I've been consistently feeling great. Even the week after a grueling 50 mile race!

How good? I've never felt this good, this consistently, in the ten years I've been running. Yesterday I zipped up and down South Fork in 85 degree heat and it didn't even seem hard (seven miles and 2000' climb to the top, then down).

I'm starting to ramp up my training for the HURT 100 in January, so this is happening at a most propitious time!

I've got a virtual mutual fund I "manage" over at Marketocracy. You can click here to see how I'm doing.

Of course I wouldn't be telling you about this if I wasn't doing phenomenally well.

Our first hike was an overnighter from Wasserauen (near Alpenzell) to Wildhaus via Megaslip & Falensee. After days of rain and iffy forecasts we were happy to see the hike begin under partly cloudy skies and warm temps. Little did we know. This was our break-in/ shake-down hike but it turned out to be pretty challenging. Mrs R complained, "you didn't break us in, you broke us!" but I ignored her.

The first section took us uphill to Sealspee where we got some fresh milk at a little dairy; then a challenging and gnarly, but beautiful climb up to Megaslip where the weather got a little more ominous. For some strange reason, the girls wanted to stop here, but we pushed on, er, up, to Wilderalp Pass 3000+ feet altitude above our starting point. Then a muddy downhill through a ranch and down to Fallensee. We stayed in a barn loft above dairy cows. Bad news: It stunk of dairy cows. Good news: There were 60 mats in the loft, but we were the only ones there. We had homemade macs and cheese for dinner and bread, cheese, milk and chocolate for breakfast. I slept well until they started bringing the cows in for milking at 5.

The next day started out on the up-and-up, in the fog and through some snow in poor visibility. Miraculously, when we reached the top (Zwingli Pass; another 2000' climb); the sky cleared and the sun came out and we enjoyed beautiful weather and views on the way down, and down, and down.

Back to Switzerland! I've shown you our pics from the 100+ mile Haute Route but our other two weeks were nearly as magnificent. We started out tamely, doing the tourist thing for a couple days before our first hike. The first two pics take you from the sublime (the Protestant Cathedral in SG was absolutely stunning) to the ridiculous (the tiny little stainless steel public potty saved space by having you do everything in one basin- including washing and drying (OK, above the basin, not actually in it). The other three pics are from the beautiful little town of Stein Am Rhein- the monastery, downtown and um, well, I just liked the blue paint on the last building.

Determined to best my time of 9:41 from back when I was a young lad of 40-something, I started out the race at a blistering (for me) 11 minute per mile pace. I managed to maintain that for the first 26 miles up and down the east Bay hills, through the mud (it poured Friday) and was actually passing runners steadily despite starting faster than I prefer.

The next four miles are all uphill and took an hour, then I got back to my 11 minute pace for the remainder of the journey. The last six miles were absolutely miserable as my legs were shot (tingly and crampy and exhausted) and the heat (near 80) was making me woozy and dizzy. Plus I had to run this section at a ten minute pace to finish under 9:30. Despite the fact that three people passed me in the last mile (Bummer! - no one had passed me for the last 30-some miles), I finished in 9:27, utterly spent. If suffering and self-discipline build character, then I'm a real character!

Running through the Redwood and Eucalyptus groves and past the viewpoints of San Francisco added highlights to what was otherwise a tough day at the office. Today I feel like that guy from Petticoat Junction ("and there's Uncle Joe, he's a-movin' kind of slow at the Junction").



After the turnaround I saw Helen Klein, she was in last place (she was at mile 22, I was at 31) with two bloody knees and no chance of making the cut-off at mile 26. Still she had plenty of time to finish those last four miles to the cutoff in less than an hour which would have given her a sub-seven-hour finish for a tough hilly trail marathon. Not bad for an 84-year old!

My friend, Peter Fish, is 71, so when he begins a sentence by saying, "It hasn't been a good year for me healthwise," I prepare myself for bad news. But he's an ultrarunner, so bad news is relative. He went on to mention that, nevertheless, he's still able to run about 50 miles a week.

People hear that I run ultras and sometimes they just burst right out: "Are you crazy?!!"

Yeah - crazy like a Fish!

Tierney is a contrarian science columnist. I like that since most scientists are sheep. Fact is, no one can keep up with everything in every specialty so most people, including scientists and doctors, rely on what "experts" in other sub-fields say. One expert speaks, thousands follow and pretty soon you have a "scientific consensus" based on the flimsiest of foundations.

Nutritionists are the absolute worst. "Baaaaa!" You have to drink eat glasses of water a day. Don't eat eggs. And what could be more obvious than the obvious: Fat makes you fat. Or does it?

"My life is good and getting better all the time. But life in the US is bad and getting worse." So says almost everyone who lives in the USA.

Michael Medved blames the media. And who can blame him?

This is one marathon I would like to run someday since I'm from the Chicago area. It's a fast course so my (tentative) plan is to run it in October '09 and qualify for Boston the following spring. Since I turn 55 in '09 the qualifying standard for Boston will become a little easier for me that year and I expect to be right on the bubble.

I'm glad I didn't run yesterday as it was the hottest CM ever (88 degrees with 80% humidity) and entrants were more likely to end up in the hospital (hundreds did, one died) than get a PR. But if you don't think marathons are exciting, check out these finishes from yesterday's men's and women's races for first place:

Our trip to Spain was brief, just a few days, but we got to stay with our good friends the Munros, missionaries to the immigrant community around Madrid. They live in a suburb and the train station near their home is where the terrorists boarded the train a few years ago and planted that bomb that killed so many people just before the last Spanish election. I preached in the church there on Sunday July 1 and we got to tour Segovia, Alcala and Madrid, along with a few other stops along the way. While there Mrs Runalong got an incredibly painful migraine one evening; SCARY painful; but fortunately there have not been any reoccurences.

Mrs R shops for a new suit:


The Mod Squad visits a castle...


The Roman Aqueduct in Segovia was more than Adequate!




The Mod Squad in Madrid...


They just don't build churches like they used to!


More pics in part two below.

Most of the tall buildings in the Madrid area have storks nesting on top:


Alcala is the birthplace of Don Quixote's creator. Mrs R just couldn't seem to get into the spirit of posing...


The church took about 20 minutes of the service to profusely thank and praise the Munros for their service this past term...

... is next Saturday. I'm in decent, though not top, shape and will be shooting for a time around 9:30. I ran the DC four years ago and finished in 9:41 so it would be nice to find that I'm just getting better with age! OTOH, I won't plan to go quite all out as the DC is more of a training run, my last chance at a 50 mile race before the HURT 100 mile race in January.

The DC 50 is named after one ultrarunning legend and directed by another, Ann Trason, probably the greatest female ultrarunner of all time. With over 15,000' of elevation change (half up and half down) it is moderately hilly by western trail race standards.

A running acquaintance sent these:

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Police were called to a day care where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.

The butcher backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

The short fortune teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

A thief fell and broke his leg in wet cement. He became a hardened criminal.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.

The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.

The dead batteries were given out free of charge.

A will is a dead giveaway.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

A backward poet writes inverse.

In a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.

A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

He broke into song because he couldn't find the key.

A lot of money is tainted: 'Taint yours, and 'taint mine.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

A plateau is a high form of flattery.

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye.

Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

David emailed me these pics awhile back.