Interview of a Lifetime
MOST OF TODAY’S ULTRARUNNERS probably don’t know that I used to be a blogger. In December of 2008, I started what became a fun few years of regularly posting ultrarunning articles that were a blend of humor, opinion, insight, history, adventure and sometimes, just plain ridiculousness. The title of the blog was (and still is) Conduct the Juices, which came about from a sticker I had in my garage climbing gym.
My background and professional career is in computer science, but I had also co-founded and co-directed the Waldo 100K beginning in 2002. I have a handful of Western States (WS) finishes and a history of volunteering, spectating, pacing and crewing at the race that stretches back to 1978. As an Oregonian obsessed with WS, I wrote a lot about the race.
Having retroactively posted my prior WS race reports – which had previously been sent out via email – I had good content right off the bat. The first year, a group of blogger friends and I started the WS “synchroblog” project. It was a simple idea: five bloggers, all who were in the upcoming WS race, privately agreed to write about certain topics leading up to WS, share our permalinks with each other so we could embed them in our respective posts, then publish at the same, scheduled time. No matter where somebody started reading, they could follow links to all the other posts. On “synchroblog mornings,”
