Busy time in the summer for me. I am in between the Run SMART Project Retreat here in Flagstaff and the Blue Ridge Running Camp in Virginia. Both commitments that make training tricky in some ways but good distractions and both afford great learning opportunities for me.
I am in front of the computer after 20 hot solo miles this morning, one of those runs that seemed to just go by fast stuck in my mind with the clock ticking by as I rolled through the woods.
We are under a month out from TransRockies and i am excited for both of us- just want it to be here so we can put to the test all this work. once i am back from Virginia I will plan on one last big push before we start- hopefully another leap in fitness.
Summertime in Flagstaff is unbelievable. Crazy afternoon thunderstorms, snakes, lush wilderness, nightime skies sprayed with stars. I would not want to be anywhere else.
Times like these I feel powerful. Everything I cherish I feel I appreciate, nothing or no one taken for granted. The things I resist against or that bring me distress I feel like I can crush, break, destroy. This is the best of me, powerful, peaceful, hopeful, aware.
My favorite quote right now:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. "

F Scott Fitzgerald






Thats all.


Mike Smith