I had the best road bike ride tonight that I’ve done in a good ten years. And I put that down mostly to my new saddle. Okay, so I bought my Ridley Fenix road bike four years ago. I hadn’t been riding consistently for several years before that and wanted to get back to it, […]

I lived in lovely Cadillac, Michigan, twenty years ago. During my few years there, I was heavily into mountain biking, and my pals John Van Eden and Harry Milton and I did a lot of traveling around to the different local trails in the northwest Lower Peninsula. My absolute favorite was a section of the […]

I came across this blog post recently, and it really struck a nerve. At first I was mentally disparaging the woman it talks about, and all the other perennial victims like her that seem to be pop up constantly these days. And let me tell you, did I ever feel morally superior. Then I got […]

That headline is a quote from Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon. You don’t need to run an ultramarathon. You don’t even really need to make pain your friend. Almost all of us, though, could stand to become a bit (or perhaps a lot) more comfortable with discomfort. I […]

I remember back when my first son was born and got old enough to tear around our yard.  I — in great cardiovascular shape from decades of extreme bicycling — felt BRITTLE running around the yard with him.  It was around that time I read an article in on a cycling website that doing only […]

I remember in the late ’70s, when I was first really getting serious about bicycling, looking at the Paramount in the Schwinn catalog and wondering who in the world would ever spend $1,500 on a bicycle.  Insane! I’ve since done so myself many times over.  But that being said, I don’t ever see reaching this price […]

I ran the Monster Dash half-marathon over in St. Paul this past Saturday.  I’d trained fairly well for it, but not really exhaustively, and because of work travel I tapered pretty dramatically the past two weeks.  So I wasn’t sure how well it would go. It went really well — I set a PR of […]

For the first time since I started running a few years back, I was able to replace my old pair of shoes with the exact same model and color. I’d thought my old shoes had held up extremely well — in fact, I really thought they looked pretty new.  Until the new ones showed up: […]

I have to admit I felt a bit funny traveling to my hometown for the funeral of a friend I knew for over thirty years, Mark “Biff” Fitting.  After all, it’s not like we were an everyday part of each other’s lives.  I worked for him for a couple summers in the early ’80s, and […]