I think that it’s a little unfortunate that blogging has basically been replaced with Instagram. With our seemingly ever-decreasing attention spans as humans, I do enjoy a quick and clever quip beneath a fun but often filtered photo as much as the next person, but I’ll always like getting a more full-picture of someone’s goings-on, and peoples’ inner thoughts put into words are fascinating to me. I always used to read peoples’ blogs, and part of why I’m resurrecting this one is because John…

I un-boxed a pair of New Balance shoes and handed them to the animated and chatty middle-aged woman across from me as she told me her story of getting back to running after a two year hiatus.



"Reconstructive ankle surgery followed by foot surgery on the opposite foot: an entire year on crutches," she explained, "I'll never take things like automatic doors for granted again."



She had literally gotten the go-ahead from her surgeon to start running an hour before. First…

I have joked with many acquaintances that the last year and a half has felt like a delayed-onset adolescence of sorts.

To state the obvious, a huge part of growing up, if not the hugEST part of growing up, is figuring out who you are and what you're about. Navigating the world and situations and friendships and relationships and potential vocational paths are all the name of the game of self-actualization.

Being somewhat of an introspective person, I started to realize a couple…

If the walls in a running store could talk, they'd have some pretty interesting tidbits to divulge.

On today's episode of Loafing Around the Register at the Runners Roost, the topic of happiness came up. Well, not directly, let me backtrack. We were taking about Emilie Forsberg, her perpetual adorable smile, her seemingly everlasting happiness, and how this just has to be because Sweden is ranked one of the happiest countries in the world.

I mean, who wouldn't be ecstatically…

I never really thought that I would find myself in a seemingly perpetual state of cognitive dissonance doing something as simple as selling people running shoes. Thing is, it's become rather infrequent that I am actually fitting a regular runner in shoes. Generally those people already know what they want and ask immediately for it, or they don't come in at all because what they know they need can be found cheaper online...such is the struggle of brick-and-mortar businesses. Story for…

My college coach, God bless 'im, seems to believe that I am on my way to becoming a professional cyclist. The guy just loves a good rags-to-riches story, and has a keep-fighting-the-fight-and-never-ever-say-die attitude, which is a large part of why I ran so well under him years ago. When I told him several months ago that running wasn't going so hot, with at that time no light whatsoever at the end of the tunnel, and I told him I just made a terribly financially irresponsible decision…

I can remember a few years ago, hanging out in a hotel room with my then-BRC/Adidas race teammates following a Club cross country after party which was, as always, completely glorious in its displays of intoxicated-awkward-runner dance moves and even more awkward advances from Masters runners who prowled the bar and dance floor looking for some poor unsuspecting runner girl to attempt to seduce with an age group medal.

Ah, like Springsteen says, "Glory days, they'll pass you by."…

I find myself sitting once more in Sharon's kitchen this morning in her awesome little house hidden in the Intervale, NH woods.

Seriously. It's hidden. I get completely lost and turned around in literally one square mile trying to find the driveway every. Single. Year. All the neighbors know me now because of my annual pulling into their driveway with my brights on in the dead of night trying to determine if their's is the correct house. Miraculously, I haven't been shot at…

Apparently "New Bike Day" is a thing in the cycling world, and I got to celebrate it last week.

I never thought I could feel drawn to any other pursuit in the same way that I've always felt drawn to running. Even in high school, at 14 years old and a total noob who didn't own so much as a stop watch, sports bra, or even a real pair of running shoes, I felt compelled to go out for the cross country team the first day of ninth grade. To this day I couldn't tell you why I felt so…

Are you going to let that skinny girl pass you?" I heard one guy rib another just in front of him as I trudged past them one afternoon on Manitou's infamous "Incline," a one mile stretch of horizontal planks that climbs roughly 2,000 feet in said mile. I smiled at his somewhat douchey but otherwise harmless comment and continued to the top, crossing the last step and taking a glance down at my watch out of curiosity, "26:47," as I started the descent down Barr Trail to do another…

Please forgive my subsequent melodramatic musings. They're certainly not intended to be written with an air of self-pity and I hope they don't come across that way, but I'm a verbal processor and to write things out…

I love a good palindrome...like the title of this post for instance. Anyway,'tis the most wonderful day (in Colorado Springs) of the year!

I remember my first trip up to train on the summit of Pikes back in the summer of 2014 one morning shortly after Mt. Washington, and glancing up to see my first bighorn sheep up close as I was picking my way across the Cog Railroad tracks…

I really thought that I would have oodles to say after Mt. Washington a few weekends ago. It was, after all, anxiously anticipated by me for weeks. And months. And to sort of a weirdly obsessive extent. Maybe because I'm weird and should get a life.

There have really only been a couple of previous occasions where…

"If you ever catch yourself describing someone's effort in an optional running competition as ‘heroic,’ consult a dictionary.”

This sentiment jumped out at me one day as I mindlessly perused the social media time toilet (except, isn’t all social media a time toilet?) that is Twitter. I stumbled upon this aforementioned Tweet the same night where, earlier, while eating dinner with two work colleagues, the subject of Tiger Woods’ recent DUI came up, along with the topic of…

Sometimes you’ve gotta get real with yourself.

You know, I think that it’s like, you “enter your thirties” and just like that, you’re old(er). Just kidding, I still feel quite young and spry, and I still giggle at jokes whose target demographic are 12 year old boys. But as I was saying: just like that, you’re older, and perhaps a bit more comfortable in your own skin and with that, less reluctant to admit things to yourself that you maybe used to deny, because it didn’t fit the mold…

I like to write things. That fact is likely made clear by the existence of my nonsensical rambling via this blog.

For one thing, writing things down is extremely cathartic. Any positive feelings or negative feelings or really just anything at all that needs to be “dumped,” if you will, out of my brain is quickly purged out by writing them down. Dumping these thoughts out of my head often provides a strange sense of closure for things that I processed and overanalyzed to death and…

So around Christmas time, I had the very excited revelation that my Demons had “come out of hibernation,” so to speak, and that I was thus hopping back into the saddle to gallop forth into the glorious sunset to set PR’s, run better than ever before, and CRUSH all races (but only uphill ones, and only at certain grades, and preferably nothing technical. I’m a bit persnickety…

“So, what do you think is the most important mental quality someone needs to have—that can’t be coached—to be a successful athlete?”

My long-time friend Corey Kubatzky posed this question to me as we conversed on an especially slow Sunday afternoon at the running shop we worked at a couple of years ago. Corey was about to take over as the head women’s cross country coach at CU-Colorado Springs, where he had formerly been the Graduate Assistant during my senior season there several…

After I finished the last run of my 30^th trip around the sun a couple of weeks back—which happened to be a hill workout (my favorite) on one of my favorite big hills (High Drive. Happy birthday to me, let's go repeatedly run uphill)—I was sitting in the river post-workout in Bear Creek Park and…