2018 is well upon us!

Happy 2018!

 On this snowy day in Boulder, Colorado, let me start this post by introducing you to our new granddog, Barley, a little fella who has brought many smiles to our new year.

Unbelievable, it is three weeks into the new year and this is my first post of 2018. Well, let this end that drought!  2017 was an interesting year running-wise for me. (Actually, it was an interesting year all the way around, but let's talk about running, shall we?) It was one of my lowest mileage years, yet I covered an extraordinary amount of territory with highlights all along the way.

Since 1990, I have only had 5 years of less than 2,000 annual miles - and one of those years was last year, 2017, with just 1,844 miles. But during the year of 2017, I also checked off 19 states in my quest to run a trail in every state of the Union. This quest has proven to be a glorious journey. During 2017 the trail quest took us from the southeastern states to Hawaii to Alaska and hopping around the midwest. We learned that packing 13 states into one trip was a bit much, that running one or two trails every day in one state (Hawaii) is a great way to visit a state; that it's o.k. to skip a few days of running if you're sailing on a small ship through the Inside Passage of Alaska and have the great fortune to run trails every now and then when stopping at tiny towns and national parks.

Traveling as much as we did dropped my running mileage a bit. A quad problem I had been trying to run through for 18 months decided it was tired of being ignored, also making it difficult to run and exacerbating the situation by affecting my hips. My mileage really dropped off at that point and I needed to turn my focus toward rehab, hip strengthening exercises, and mobility work.

And now we have a new year. Quads are happier - not perfect, but happier. And Kendall and I are putting together our travel plans for the year. We're thinking mid-Atlantic states in the spring, some of the southwestern states we've yet to do in May-ish, northeastern states in late August, and, of course, a few trips to Petoskey thrown in here and there. I'm saving Colorado for the grand finale'. In the meantime, I'm slowly (hopefully adequately cautiously) building my mileage back up. As part of this build-up, I also hope to keep a better record of my running progress with much more frequent blog posts than I've been managing over the past year or so.

We had a snow day here in Boulder today.  Taz heading into and tackling today's run pretty much summed up my heading into 2018 and tackling my running goals for the year.

 Taz, the statue. 

I put the booties on him and he did not move an inch 

until I tugged on the leash and coaxed him out the door

And Taz, once out the door and in the wild & wooly winter weather

booties gone (he lost them in less than a block)

and running free