About Me

I ramble.  Therefore I am.

Me in a nutshell: I was born in New Jersey, went to school in Pennsylvania where I met the wonderful woman who is now my wife, moved to said wife’s home state of New Hampshire, bought a house, found out my employer was closing the NH office, bought a conversion van, sold the house, and headed out to explore the country in said van.

Throughout all of this I was a fairly lazy and inactive person.  I enjoyed being outside, riding my bike, camping, hiking, and the like, but was pretty dreadful at sports and typically brought up the rear in both my single season of high school cross country and every hike I ever went on with my Boy Scout troop.

Between May and October of 2005 we visited thirty states in 150 days and ate a lot of junk food from truck stops.  It was time for a real kitchen, real food, and a real diet.  We kicked started a better lifestyle with two months of NutriSystem (during which time I dropped 25% of my weight – not healthy!), then ditched their overprocessed foods and started doing it right.

Ceridwen (my aforementioned wonderful wife) has always been better about fitness than I was, so once we dropped our “road trip weight” and had settled in to Phoenix, AZ for a little bit, we signed up for Lifetime Fitness to get less scrawny.  Ceridwen got addicted – she’s now a certified TurboKick instructor (as well as a Personal Trainer) even though the program has gone all BeachBody MLM – and I got slightly less scrawny, but still hated running.  On a treadmill.

Fast forward another year or so to the summer of 2007.  We’re living in Dorset, VT at this time and enjoying the small town vibe.  There’s a Fourth of July 5k Fun Run in the park down the road and we decide on July 1 to sign up for it.  I did two – maybe three – “training” runs (calling them training runs without sarcastic quotes is an insult to trainers everywhere), couldn’t run the whole thing without walking for a bit, and still managed to place third in my age group (in a huge field of 8 guys 30-39…).  Ceridwen, of course, won her age group.  Show off.

But I was hooked.  Running outside is SO MUCH MORE FUN than that silly ol’ treadmill.  And races?  Wheeee!  I signed up for the NH/VT Race for the Cure 5k and the local Maple Leaf Half Marathon at the end of the summer, bought some decent shoes that actually fit right, started researching what this whole “training” thing is, and started slipping in to the deep vortex known as running geekery.  Woe.

So now I’ve run a whole bunch of miles (900ish in 2008, just over 1000 in 2010, and on target for 1200 in 2010) and a whole bunch of races from 5ks to full marathons and am feeling it more and more necessary to speak on the subject.  Plus I like to ramble.  Had I mentioned that?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the RV part, in 2006 we upgraded from the conversion van to a Keystone Zeppelin II (no longer in production), and then in 2009 traded both in for a Four Winds Hurricane (and a 1992 Saturn SC2 that we tow behind it).  We oscillate between going stir-crazy after being stationary for more than a few weeks and hopping from town to town every week or so and getting sick of the constant motion and “settling down” for a couple of months in one place.

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