Another weekend, another race, right? These towns aren’t going to run themselves… A quick scan of the spreadsheet of Connecticut races on the group’s website yielded a hit in Plainville, about a 40 minute drive up Rt. 8. I’d never been there, or really heard of the place, but when I arrived, it was clear […]

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After Milford, I felt like I was on a roll. Another weekend? I’ll try another race, this one in a town I’d never visited before, New London. The start and finish were in the picturesque center of town, with great old buildings and the war memorial. You can never really tell with the added population […]

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After seeing a number of “Run 169 Towns” shirts at Mt. Washington, I checked up on the group and thought it would be a fun thing to do. This race on the fourth of July was the first one nearby in a town I’d never run before, so we all headed over to Milford to […]

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After running my first Mt. Washington Road Race on the 21st, I thought I’d try to keep things going and sign up for a local 5K later on in the month. I’d never been to Derby, though it’s not far from Woodbridge, and we were free that weekend, so it fit the bill. It was […]

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I remember this race mostly because it was the occasion of Grace’s first fun run. She ran with me around the track at Cheshire High School, mostly recovered from her traumatic run-in with the costumed mascot, and got a giant t-shirt to remember it by. For my part, it was an uneventful, fairly sluggish 5K, […]

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Preparing for the start of the Mt. Washington Road Race this weekend, I saw a number of runners with nice-looking shirts featuring the outline of the state of Connecticut, silhouettes of runners, and the words “RUN 169 TOWNS, DEBTICONN.ORG” I looked up the address when I got home, and discovered wonderfully ramshackle website for the […]

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Through some miracle of email magic and friends in high places, Dad managed to get us both into the Mt. Washington Road Race this year, despite us both having failed in the increasingly competitive lottery entry system. I had been running all winter, thanks to our treadmill, but my workouts had been shorter, and less […]

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Yes, it’s only one hill, but that’s some hill. The race is over now, and I’m happy to say I survived, and had a great time (in the sense that I enjoyed myself, not that I finished competitively). Coming into the race, I was familiar with the course, having driven it before, but I’d never […]

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Nearly a year ago, a week before we moved east, I finally had the chance to run Mt. Marathon, the Alaskan mountain race. It was a lot of fun, and fulfilled a long-held dream of mine, as we’d watched Dad run the race so many times as we grew up. The other big mountain race […]

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And so my fearsome November has come to an end. It began with the marathon, which seems like it was about a year ago now, and featured travel on four of the five weekends during the month. The day after we returned from New York, I headed to Richmond, Virginia, for the AMIA Conference and […]

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Alright, New York City Marathon. I trained for you in California, when moving east wasn’t even on our minds. I trained for you in Alaska, when I ran a half-marathon and speed-walked up a mountain. I trained for you in Massachusetts, in Rhode Island, in Vermont, and in Connecticut. Through the birth of our second […]

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I didn’t necessarily think choosing to run the New York City Marathon this year was the best idea I’d ever had, but I didn’t realize now ill-timed it would turn out to be. Packing up and selling a house, moving across the country, sleeping in the same room as a baby who doesn’t sleep, starting […]

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I ran four miles on Sunday, which I normally wouldn’t be excited about, especially since my marathon training schedule had me down for 17 that day. We’re now nine weeks from the New York City Marathon, and I’m running without pain (fingers crossed) for the first time since the spring. Over the last few months, […]

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We had a few reliable holiday traditions growing up: glögg and Swedish songs at Christmas, fondue for New Years, and Mt. Marathon in Seward for the Fourth of July. While we’ve been able to recreate the edible ones after I moved from Alaska, it’s impossible to duplicate the experience of small-town Seward on race day. […]

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