When a month feels like a million years

I hope those last days with her were lucid, heart-opening and helped with a sense of closure and celebrating life. ~ Jonny Copp

So aside from a blip last week where I live-blogged the Enduro, things have been pretty quiet around RunStuRun of late (as I am sure you have noticed). These last few weeks have been crazynuts. Rachel and I have been taking turns going over to Gunnison to help my dad care for my mom in her last days. She passed away two weeks ago after a long battle with cancer. Not good times, I can assure you. Take the quote above and reverse it in every possible way and you will get the experience we have all had to endure.



As most of you probably do not know, I have long been a proponent of physician assisted suicide. I even wrote my Senior Thesis on the subject after doing interviews and surveys of a large group of physicians. Their comfort with the subject was mixed but I feel strongly that we have the right to a dignified death. Unfortunately, there is a small yet vocal community here in the States that disagrees quite fervently. My guess is that few of them had to bear witness to the final weeks of a loved-one with terminal cancer. Let me just say, this is a shitty way to go.

So March and April saw Rach and I taking shifts at my mom’s bedside, seeing each other for a few hours every week or so as we became more and more familiar with the 200+ mile drive between my parents’ house and our own. I am off again this weekend to L.A. but am hoping to get some serious stay-at-home time in the coming month. Needless to say, I miss my sweetie and can’t thank her enough for all she did to help out with what was a repeat performance for her. Rachel’s mom died from cancer back in ’99 and Rach was her sole care-giver for her final two months. Knowing what doing this once feels like, I can’t really put words to how awful the repeat performance must have been.

So the last few weeks weren’t all bad. I did get to do a little skiing at the Butte (off the hook), got in a couple of runs in Gunny (flat pavement is a bit boring), did the Enduro with Luke (56 runs, ~112000 feet of vert, not too shabby), and have started running again in order to try to get into shape for the summer’s fun and/or games.

I did a short run in the woods around our house on Tuesday that quickly turned into a bit of a lost-in-the-woods post-holing hike but it was fun to get out. There is still too much snow up high so I’ll have to stick to the roads up here for a bit. Yesterday, I decided it would be a good idea to run Flagstaff and Green Mountains in Boulder. Roughly 10 miles with feet of climbing. I didn’t run a lot of this as I am still working into my running fitness and was pretty hammered by the time I made it to Bear Canyon but feel okay about the effort in general. I was quite a bit off my pace from the same run (roughly the same time) last year but that was a spectacular run and like I said, I am still working on my running fitness right now. With only 6 runs or so tallied for the year, I feel good about my performance.

So there you go. The Cliffs Notes version of what is happening in the world of Stu. I am still hoping to break 70 ski days this year (63 thus far) and am really looking forward to a lot of long runs in the coming months. I would also like to build a garage but need to get my act together to get that done. As always, I’ll keep you posted.