Category: A Surfer’s Journal

Maybe this is why I’m still pushing out the miles. Maybe I figured it out during the Summer of The Shark. Yes, that was a real thing. There was a slew of attacks. It started a few years ago, and yes, there have been “Summers of the Sharks” before. In ’01 a kid named Jesse […]

Then it hit. Now, how do you describe something that is just so common when you live in a hurricane belt that you don’t take much notice of it. It rained. It did not just rain, though, it opened up. By that midpoint, the sky was dark, the wind was whipping and every single course […]

OK, so what I came to learn later is the number signs were set up so the faster people — the ones who run a five or six or seven minute per mile pace — so they can start in front of the pack and not get mixed up with the 11 and 12 dregs. […]

So about that time, maybe ten minutes out from whatever the start time was, I began to look around. I was sure I’d see multitudes of local dads and moms. Guys who I was silently and barbarically and naturally competing with on every important neighborly level. We may act all civil and domesticated while we’re […]

The common literary device, at this point, is to flash back to the origins of marathonning and use those legends to help build dramatic and psychological intensity so that what comes after will have true cinematic epiphanies. (I just made all that crap up. I guess I could make up stuff about the “origin of […]

This is going to sound arrogant, but what have I written in my life that has not? I was a newspaper sports columnist for a lot of years, and this was pre-internet. You couldn’t just blabber online and everyone would forget it. You had to go to the bar that night your column came out […]

So how do you go about training for a marathon with just six or eight weeks to get in shape? Honestly, truthfully, I didn’t give a damn. I wasn’t in any way interested in building up miles, then tapering off, and watching nutrition, and eating nutrition. I am against nutrition. Chiliburger diets worked for the […]

So the marathon was coming, and I couldn’t care less. As usual, every morning I’d get up and go tromp the beach. One day north, another day south. Usually, I prefer to run into the wind first, so most of the time I’d run south to start. Then on the way back, with the breeze, […]

I am firmly convinced that any human on the planet could run a marathon. People out there set them as their entire life’s goal, thinking “Wow, if I could get in that kind of shape, I’d be ripped and that would sure show all those assholes from high school.” But you don’t, in any way, […]

One day, we were out surfing… OK OK there’s backstory first, but it’s the kind you can skim through. I’d walked to the beach that morning, maybe the bike had a flat, not sure, but in that case I’d have to wear my flip flops. So I left them on the sand at the bottom […]