A quick summary of exciting news past, present, and upcoming!
It’s been a hot minute since I blogged consistently and shared some Fri-yay Fast Favorites, and there’s a lot of exciting news that I’ve been sharing on social media, but I never did share it in one coherent space! So here’s a super quick summary and round-up of some of the things going on in my life and some of my current favorites that I wanted to share with you.
I didn’t always consider myself a trail runner, but now, on the brink of becoming a trail ultramarathoner, I realize how trail running has always been important to me.
It has been a ridiculously long time since I’ve been active on this blog, and yes, I miss it, but on the other hand it’s been thrilling to have such a fast-paced summer.
So if I haven’t been blogging, then what the heck have I been up to?! (The responsible and mostly true but boring answer is I’ve been busy with my job - technology moves fast and creating innovative technology means I have to move even faster.) But the more exciting thing to say is I’ve been running trails.
How long distance trails can become embedded in our psyche
I don't know when I first heard about the Appalachian Trail. It seems like I've always known about it, like it was some seed of knowledge that was embedded deep in my psyche before I was even born, but I must have learned about it at some point. Most likely I was just exposed to bits and pieces of information about the trail and so I learned about it piecemeal. Even the first time I set foot on the trail - on a day hike in Virginia with one of my best friends from college - I hadn't quite grasped the true meaning of the trail. I understood it existed and I understood you could hike it. I even understood that you could thru-hike it if you were crazy enough to love mountains and pain and you disliked showers and soft beds, but I certainly didn't grasp that there was an entire culture of people who lived and breathed the trail.
Bald camping, meteors, a dog who decides to be a pest, and blueberries
Awkward and anticlimatic. That's pretty much how that weekend went. Work hard, go someplace new on your own, try not to freak out about the new place or people or being on your own, and still things just play out really awkwardly anyways. Sounds about right for me. And so I ran away to the mountains where Ryder was a jerk and the sky was cloudy and obscured the meteor shower and my tripod lost its handle and I totally missed Shining Rock.
If you do a Google search for “Art Loeb Trail” you’ll find all sorts of blog posts by people who decided to go on a hike or a trail run in the wilderness and totally got their butts kicked. This blog post is no exception.