Well it's been a long time. I'm sorry I left ya. Without a dope entry to step ta. It has been four months, man. I’ve done some shit. But nothing that seems totally spectacular. I went on an 8-day camping trip in the Goat Rocks Wilderness with Nick and Ted. I did some swimming and camping at the Yuba River. I saw Merle Haggard at a little fairgrounds outside Sacramento. I learned how to ride a motorcycle, and bought one. I went to Europe for a week—seven days, four countries, lots of time on planes, a few truly terrible hotels. Good espresso in Milan. Kick-ass bike-riding in Amsterdam. Spargel. Ate a great dinner on a warm evening in an old town square outside Brussels. Went to Las Vegas with the fam, and lost what I recall to be a shitload of money while becoming a no-pass bettor. Went to a couple of great Giants games—Bonds homered in both, G-men won both. Became a beekeeper, and installed a hive on the roof of my apartment. I also moved into my own apartment which has been fabulous. Got a worm bin and some plants. Also bought a couch. Became addicted to Friendster, Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, and coffee, again. Oh well.

It has been an extraordinary few weeks, and I feel a little guilty for letting these diaries slide. Since the last entry, I watched my beloved Jayhawks make a truly stunning March run; then I watched the Kansas program disintegrate when Roy Williams decided to leave for UNC. Meanwhile, I traveled to Toronto, Boston, Portland (Maine), Milwaukee, Denver, and Salt Lake City. In between feeling exhausted by travel, exhilirated by the 'Hawks, and then depressed and enraged by Roy's departure, I went on a few runs -- some terrible, some interesting yet non-extraordinary, and one epic yet ultimately bittersweet. Terrible: In Waterloo, Ontario, I went on a 25-minute run in 0-degree weather, not terrible in and of itself, but it turned terrible when the wind started blowing, nearly flash-freezing my private parts like plumbing in a cold snap. Interesting: I went on a couple of hour-long runs in Waterloo -- one on a somewhat scenic cross-country ski track, and another on a series of roads around a provincial park. Non-extraordinary: When I arrived in Toronto, I ran along an empty, quiet waterfront path; yes, it was cool to run by an old sugar refinery and a disused pier, but the low, gray cloud ceiling and the strange stillness made me want to get back to my comfy nest at the Fairmont Royal York. Epic: In Portland, Maine, I ran along a bayside trail that paralleled an old railroad track, then went around the waste-water treatment plant and over a interstate viaduct to another little bay. Throughout the run, my mind was on the Jayhawks, who had recently destroyed Marquette and who were poised to dismantle Syracuse. Everything was falling into place; the better part of the story had been written during upsets of Duke and Arizona, all the 'Hawks had to do was finish it off. Four hours later, Jayhawk Nation reckoned not so much with the devastation wrought by the Orangemen but with the implosion of the legendary Kansas break that laid waste to much better teams all year long. The next week, for me, was a blur of hotel rooms, buffet breakfasts, airport lounges, and hospital hallways. I was in Cincinnati twice and never left the airport. I spent a grand total of 18 hours in Milwaukee but managed to fit in a night's work, a day's sleep, and three unremarkable meals. In the week since I've been back, I've gone on a couple 30+ min Bernal Busters, two Cinemax After-Darks, and one Tank Hill-to-UCSF summit run. Unremarkable.

I wasn't planning on doing this run when I started out from Slide, but something about the Heather Cut-Off Trail made me want to go for it. My legs felt terrible on the little jaunt up to Highway 1 from the Owl Trail, but when I was halfway down the Heather Cut-Off, I started to feel that old kick, that old urge to push it, and I decided to go for it. All along Frank's Valley Road, I really felt my legs. I usually cruised thru that section, but today I felt a few pangs of regret that I had decided to try this. When I got to the Dipsea, I headed up reluctantly and vowed to not let my heart-rate go above 165. About 1/4 mile in, it was there, and I felt like I was barely moving, so I upped the limit to 170 and stuck it there for the rest of the climb. Because I wasn't pushing myself, the climb seemed sort of peaceful, and I noticed things that I hadn't noticed the previous twenty or so times I've done this run. My time wasn't even that bad, though I feel like I've broken 1:10 before. Probably. I didn't really cruise through any of it, so maybe 1:10 is possible when my body feels better. I do know that when I ran this with Dave a couple of years ago, we clocked 1:25. When I finished, I had some excellent cheese with Steve and then drove back to the city with Sara.

Erik Skarstad & Robin did a quick 25-minute run along the Owl Trail to Muir Beach Overlook this afternoon. It was chilly and windy all day long, and I didn't really get to hang out with E & R that much, but this run was a nice little chance to reconnect and kick out some minimal jams.

The first run in the wartime US, and it was alternately freaky and styley. Freaky because there seem to be 4 or 5 helicopters over SF at any given moment. Styley because it was sort of cool to be cruising up the trail along the steep slope of Twin Peaks with helicopters hovering overhead. I was heading up that last slope while the last little streaks of twilight faded, usually a quiet, still time all over the city. The protests of the last couple of days have created a persistent sort of buzz, and with the droning whomp-whomp-whomp of the helicopters getting louder and louder, I felt like I was climbing up into a hive. One thing about helicopters flying around, though: People don't drive up to Twin Peaks. So I had it all to myself. Which was sort of amazing. I half-expected to see Marines talking on radios and stringing razor wire around it. War.

I didn't want to run this evening because my legs have been feeling sort of thrashed. I'm beginning to think that they can't recover unless I take more than 1 day off between runs. They want me to have pity for them, but I'm not going to satisfy them. They could also be mad because I've been staying up late a lot, eating a lot of cheese, and drinking a consistent 4-5 beers per evening. But what do my legs care about beer?

If last night hadn't totally kicked my ass, I would have dominated this run. The weather was cool and a little too breezy, but the Tank Hill to UCSF to Buena Vista trifecta felt brisk and good. But even though I felt a step slow, I didn't press and just tried to enjoy the first little licks of spring. So anyway last night I went out to Slide Ranch to visit my friend Steve, and he cooked an excellent meal of beans, tortillas, and flan; this tasted especially good after a long day in the sun at my beekeeping class, so I washed it all down with a few beers and then went a little nuts with a couple of shots of kind tequila. Then, I took my sleeping bag outside to sleep, and carved out a nice little spot under some Monterey Cypress next to the hive and the barn. Which was peaceful and nice, until it started raining. So at 2am I ran back down to Steve's house, getting somewhat drenched, and burst in the door, scaring the shit out of everyone. So anyway I had a good, long breakfast of creamed eggs and had some of Steve's special espresso, which helped right the ship.

A rainy evening that seemed just perfect for an assault on Twin Peaks. The last little stretch on the east side of Christmas Tree Point was brutal -- blustery and cold, which made the rain seem thicker and more intense than it really was -- but on the whole this run was great. Rainy runs have this quiet, lonely quality that I always love.

At around 4pm, the Stanford campus is always filled with runners, cyclists, and athletes in cardinal red apparel. I appreciate this, and yet, at the same time, I feel like I'm running among highly-intelligent alien pod-people who have sinister intentions and have assumed the forms of innocuous, white-bread athletic types in order to remain low profiles. I imagine that they detach their jaws and swallow giant rats when my back is turned, and that their reproductive behavior involves giant proboscises and coiling and perhaps some kind of egg-laying. As always, this run was suspiciously uneventful.

Why, God, why does this run kick my ass so often? Almost every time, I experience infernal cardio and quad pain during the climb from the Stanford Ave entrance. The best stretch of the run is immediately after this climb -- it's an S-shaped quarter-mile heading due west (usually into the wind) and it provides a great view of the dish against the coastal range. But I'm usually fighting to catch my breath during this stretch, so I spend most of it just trying to keep my shit together. This particular run was okay ... I keep thinking that I'll get back to the good old days when I regularly clocked sub-50-minutes on this run. But I'm a long, long way from that right now. What is the explanation? I ride my bike a lot more. I run hills a lot more. But can it be that I'm just not as fit as I was in those lovely, peaceful days of July 2002? The last days of my 20's? I will remember July of 2002 as a series of quiet evening runs through the Stanford campus, punctuated by blissfully fast, fast times. Ah, to be young and in California. Simpler times. Simpler, faster times.

Take one crystal-clear Friday afternoon ... add 1 shot espresso ... stir in one glass of Odwalla C Monster. Then, slide, slide. Dip, shake. Move it all around. Move it all around. To quote and now paraphrase Missy Elliott, I'm just a runner, tryin to live, and this run was one long freak-the-fuck-out because I was all hopped up on caffeine, vitamin C, and kind weather. I raced up and down, and then rode my bike really fast to Zeitgeist at 6-ish, where I began a long night of drinking and carousing that took me to: Movida, Thep Phanom, the Uptown, the Hush-Hush Club, and finally the Lexington. Then I had to walk around for a while when I got home because the caffeine was still to much. You know, I'm just a runner, tryin to live.

I haven't done the dish loop in months ... perhaps since before the New Year. Is that possible? In any case, I never expected to have such a terrible time with it. My PR is in the high 48's, and, in comparison, this one just seems pathetic and weak. I should probably subtract 3 or so minutes from the time, though, because I had to run down to the secret entrance after getting to the Stanford Street gate a couple of minutes after 5pm. So this one was really in the 51 range, though that still sucks in comparison. Plus, I was in pain for some of the run, as my new Adidas fat-boys were killing my feet while I was at the dish. Mostly, I'm mad that I wasted a really beautiful day on a crappy run.

I haven't done this run for a while, and tonight's was a happy return. I consumed a lot of caffeine at around 7pm, violating my only iron-clad self-medicating policy: no caffeine after 3pm. Ever. Or, almost ever. I was a golden god from 7pm on, and my run took advantage of this artifical self-esteem and turned it into an all-consuming delusion of athletic indomitability which became especially acute as I neared the top of BH. I wasn't even close to my PR of 28-something, but I felt great and the run felt like an extraordinary success because what else matters, really? It was moonless and misty, and the top of Bernal Heights was dark, dark. In fact, I couldn't see the trail at all, which didn't bother me because I WAS A GOLDEN GOD. Plus, I was the only person up there, giving me a really good chance to belt out Ween's song "Piss up a rope" and "Jolene". So I raced up and down, got my heart rate up there, and arrived back home ready to solve all the world's problems. Was it possible to solve them while playing Grand Theft Auto? I guess we'll find out.

A spectacular day made for long, easy runs. Beave and Ellen and I had been talking about doing a run for a long time, so I took them on a modified version of the balls-to-the-wall run that Jimmy and I have done a few times in the past. We started at Dolores Park, and went at a chill pace up toward Twin Peaks. When we got to Corbett, I decided to show them the urban assault route, and we went straight up the side of the hill. They're gamers, so I hoped that they'd be okay with a steep, sinister climb early in the run. And they were, and in fact, they had kept up the great attitudes as we went over the bumps on TP and on to Mt Davidson. The weather was warm and clear, and San Francisco had that peaceful, easy feeling that makes you want to sing along to the Eagles, wear flip-flops and BBQ on the front steps. We finished at around 4:30, and the afternoon was fading to a crisp, cool evening that I spent on the porch of Wild Side West in Bernal Heights.

I fakied the usual CAD run to scout a route for my Saturday run with Beave and Ellen. I headed up Twin Peaks Blvd, and then went down from the TP viewing platform on the trail that comes up from Corbett. Incidentally, Corbett is the street that Romain dead-ends into, not Graystone. I found that it actually took more out of me to do it the loopy, flatter fakey way than to just bomb up it from Corbett. Why? Who knows? Maybe because I'm inclined to run harder when the route seems flatter. In any case, it started raining when I hit Kite Hill on the way back down, so the rest of the run was actually lovely. Cool and wet, and the sun was setting and the city was quiet and misty even though it was rush hour.

Of course I decide to run on Sunday. Saturday was clear, warm, and easy-going in this way that I always knew California would be, and I spent most of it working on my law school personal statement. Sunday was rain. Rain and wind. Can anyone blame me for not being inspired by rain and wind? Or cold? Did I mention cold? My hands got cold near Tank Hill, and then I got one of those terrible nether-region numbnesses that forced me to do some provisional warming with my hand while I ran. Anyway, I turned back after I hit Tank Hill, going back through Cole Valley, Buena Vista Park, and the Castro. NONE of this would have happened if I'd run on Saturday.

The standard cruiser with nothing really special to note except that, even after three years of running through a campus that is ostensibly easy of the eyes: I. still. hate. Stanford. The sterile institutionality, the parking lots filled with BMWs, the Amazonian athletes in sweats, the lame sandstoney buildings, the false importance, the eau de academic competition that rubs off on you like bad cologne at a nightclub. It's all of these things, and none of them. There's something unnameably distasteful about it; something that hits you afterward, like food poisoning. Maybe it's that I must admit, it's not a bad place to see at 8 miles an hour. Plus, there are always runners, like me, who look serious about what they do, like I'm sure I do. So it's like getting food poisoning from food that you like, and then going back again and again.

It's called Cinemax After-Dark for a reason; okay, for a few reasons. One, it's cinematic. I take 19th Street through the peaceful, family-friendly environs of Dolores Park through the beefcaked Castro, and then cut through that little park on Seward, skirt Kite Hill and finally corkscrew up and over the footbridge that dumps onto Romain in Twin Peaks. And from the cinematic, we move to the MAXimum panoramic. Romain dead-ends into Graystone, or some street like that, but I maintain maximum velocity and keep heading straight and go up up up the side of the hill. No trails. Just me, the blackberry bushes, and the pain. Within 100 yards, I'm in the parking lot of an elementary school, and within another 50, I'm on a real trail that switches back all the way up to the viewing area atop Twin Peaks. This is where it gets, ahem, after dark. Tune in the wacka-chicka-wacka-chicka funky bass at this point, because I've seen a fair amount of cruising action on the street below the trail, especially at dusk. But the trail to the top is usually uneventful, except for the cine-pana-sex-oramic views as you take the last little switchback before the top. After delivering the GE design work at the literal -- LITERAL -- ass-crack of dawn, I was very, very ready to run this evening. A lovely, lovely evening to run, too.

When I set out this evening, I thought that I had a shot at shattering my PR for this run -- 32:59, set on a cool night last July -- but I quickly discovered that I was way off the required pace. Way off. And when I tried to step it up, I had no lung stamina. Usually I feel my legs way more than I feel my lungs, so this seemed strange. I tried to push it for a while, but I gave up somewhere around Lake Lagunita and settled into a pace that felt more comfortable for the rest of the run, but it was still disappointing. As I was cooling down, I realized that I hadn't really done a short cruiser run since before Christmas -- this probably has something to do with my slower time. I've also been riding my bike a lot, running hills a lot, working a lot. In any case, the run totally took my mind off the design doc that I should have been finishing.

A little light rain always kinda spices up a run. It sprinkled on and off this evening as I did another little tour of the alleyways of Glen Park, and then somehow ended up in a housing project on top of Diamond Heights. It was surreal, really; I kept climbing higher and higher, and the houses were getting bigger and bigger, and then I noticed glass from a broken car window on the ground. Then I saw an empty forty-oz bottle in a paper bag laying on a lawn. The houses didn't look particularly project-ish, but they definitely were not cut from the same cloth as the hilltop palaces around Twin Peaks, Buena Vista Park, Corona Heights, etc. But it makes a weird sort of sense -- being stuck on top of a hill isn't too different, really, from being stuck out near the airport, or down near the port. They're all places that people don' t have to pass through to get anywhere else. Anyway, when I got back down to Glen Park, I found the best alleyway yet ... it was right below the project street, and it was a good 300 yards of dirt road that leads to a secret little park that I am going to call Ray Brower Park, after the dead kid in Stand By Me. It was really quiet back there, and a little creepy, especially in the rain.

a hill-less run from folsom street to glen canyon park by way of precita park. i did a little exploring, and found another great unpaved alley called ohlone way near glen park. i also came across a sinister little summit park near the intersection of bosworth, congo and elk streets. it's called dorothy w. something park, and in the soft focus of this evening's rain and fog, it looked like el greco meets the brothers grimm -- rocky and uneven terrain, droopy trees, ringed by a crappy, root-riddled trail. on a gentler note, the little flower hut at 23rd and shotwell was open tonight, bright light and flowers bursting out the door, making happy haloes in the mist.

A long afternoon run over Tank Hill, the hill behind UCSF hospital, Buena Vista summit, and Corona Heights summit. Warm weather and hip-hop in my head: Hey, hey, hey, hey shorty, it's your birthday; we're gonna party like it's your birthday, drink Bacardi like it's your birthday. (Repeat).

When I was in Cuba, I kept hearing a Spanish version of the Carpenters' song about the kind of husssshh all over the world .. tonight .. etc. The Spanish version was an exact copy: "Hay un tipo de silencio sobre todo el mundo .. esta noche .." and it seemed like I couldn't turn on the radio without hearing it in 15 minutes. For some reason, whenever I run during the sunset, I always think of this song, and tonight it was going through my head on an endless loop as I skirted along Tank Hill and down through the Upper Haight.

Unremarkable, except that my legs feel especially dead.

Is this February? It feels like April. The whole run was sunny and cool, people in flip-flops. Each of the three peaks of Twin Peaks had people on it, and there was really amazing clarity over the whole city, which seemed still and slow and quiet.