Well… so this happened. Or I guess I should say this DIDN’T happen. Sigh. Maybe next year? (*) German for “so out of luck”

Hoo-boy. This jetlag is rough. Fourteen and a half-hours separate the Los Angeles time zone (where I am at the moment) and Myanmar’s. I’m struggling with the transition back into this world as it is, catching up on mail, paperwork, and bills. I want to say my internal clock is messed up mainly because of […]

Winging my way back on what is the last of the flight legs to Los Angeles, I’m somewhere between consciousness and delirium. I slept a bit in a transit hotel in Kunming, the smell of cigarettes permeating the sheets and a chill in the room thanks to the staff’s efforts to air the place out […]

  I’m up… and I’m not dead yet! Albeit the second hand smoke of the guy puffing away on his unfiltered cigarette was trying to expedite my appointment with the Grim Reaper. Two more flights… 18 and a half hours to go…

I have done nothing today. It’s just been a travel day… and really only the prologue to the traveling day tomorrow. Here’s my itinerary: And that was BEFORE the initial flight from Bagan to Yangon to start. And BEFORE the Pope was arriving in Myanmar at the same time as I was trying to leave. […]

The celebration dinner began with an hour long sunset cruise… well, a half hour standing in the sun waiting for our boat to get aligned properly so we could board, followed by a cruise around the Erawati (or is it Irrawaddy?) River. We were told we would have the smaller, more intimate boat and it […]

I couldn’t sleep.  And training for the next race starts the day after the last… so at 5:40 AM I was on the roads of Bagan pounding the… dirt?  rocks?  packed sand?  A bit of roadway?  All of the above? It was a s-l-o-w recovery run.  By design and by necessity.  I did take the […]

After the race, I couldn’t bare to lie down or even sit down — the sudden muscle spasms that locked in place and shot pain through my calves and then through my body were predictable only insomuch as they DIDN’T happen when I was walking around.  So I tried to just walk the streets of […]

Well, that sucked. No, let me rephrase. The race was good but *I* sucked. And as is my custom at races featuring kilometer markings, I cursed the metric system at the 26K mark.  Why, oh why couldn’t this have been 26 miles?! It was a hot, humid day, as advertised. But even knowing that, and […]

The pre-race pasta dinner was an elegant affair under the stars. Unfortunately it was also under the rain clouds. The rain therefore prompted a mad dash to seek cover and wreaked havoc with the microphones and speakers set up for the course overview. Fortunately the rain stopped after dessert and we were able to crowd […]