I can no longer deny the concept of miracles as October has definitely had a number of them. From managing to pull off the haunted trail against all injury odds, the weather holding off long enough for almost all of our trail guests on the second night and the stunning fact that with all the happenings this month, we still managed to continue our self-enforced quota of 6 posts per month (with this post). A big help from Brad on that last one who has actually been on assignment himself practically this entire month. The date of the annual haunt is definitely the pinnacle of the year, but the national day of spook is just a small step behind for the year’s excitement. In honor of team orange and black, thought I would show you a few of the sights and sounds from our big event starting with this year’s recap video my partner in haunt Paul has once again created to memorialize the effort and provide an incentive for those that were unable to make it this year.
Hit the jump to see a few more images taken before and during the haunted trail event.
Halfway through the daunting task of getting through the Haunted Trail of Fears recap for 2024. Admittedly, a bit late in the year getting to this as the next one is only 2 months away. All good things take time I guess – or more accurately push the tedious stuff of as much as possible ha. My fingers are finally recovered from part one of this series. If you want to check out the behind the scenes build process and see some of the trail in daylight, pop back to the previous post (link here). Need to mention that we were light on our picture taking after the sun went down for the 2024 event. I think part of the problem was absolute exhaustion from the late hour issues that were covered in part one. We did get some and I’ll share those now.
Here’s my partner in haunt Paul posing at the start of the trail. The 12′ Inferno Skelly was added the previous year, but we did pick up a few of his minions to assist in its quest to terrify our guests – I am sure the fact that Paul is smiling is not helping his cause ha.
Hit the jump to see more of the after dark sights on the 2024 Haunted Trail of Fears.
Ever have those things just hanging over your head that you just never seen to get time to address? Some of those are due to not wanting to deal with a painful grind to get it taken care, some you just know are going to be a rabbit hole of issues once you pop the top and then there are those things that just take time that isn’t there. That is the case with this series of posts. I am once again delinquent on the recap of our annual haunted Halloween trail. The 2024 Trail of Fears was held the last weekend of September – we are nearing almost a solid year behind and now this year’s scarefest is just around the corner. I don’t mind getting behind on my photo queue, but don’t want that to happen on the haunt front as we use these as references for the next year (what went right, what went wrong, how we go bigger – normal postmortem activities). If there is one advantage to being laid up, it’s being able to address the busy work. Brace yourselves, we are going to burn through your browser cache in these posts!
Hit the jump for a behind the scenes look at how this event all comes together. They say it isn’t work if you enjoy what you are doing and without question we live for all things orange and black!
Guess it is time to get this recent race recollection post out of the way. In my ultra career I have definitely had my ups and my downs. Some races have just been a struggle to make it to the starting lines and others just seemed to go smoothly from start to finish. This is likely the nature of the beast so to speak as this is one of those hobbies that takes a significant amount of commitment long before the race actually begins and that is just the event elements, throw in the rest of life and things get tricky. My recent 50 mile ultra run at Farmdale falls into the struggle category and one riddled with bad luck.
For the summary, I’ve said two things went right the entire race. One is I managed to get up on time (5:00am start time) and secondly, I did manage to successfully cross the finish line – everything else in between was a study in suffering and Murphy’s Law. If you really want the details, feel free to hit the jump. Note, if you are considering getting into ultra-running, I’d recommend not letting yourself be tainted by this particular experience ha.
July has traditionally been a big running month here at Intrigued. The month usually kicks off with the Cry Me a River 50K Ultra-Trail Run, somewhere in middle Jan has her run for St. Jude and the end of the month has been devoted to the Bix 7 Race held in Davenport, IA. Being that we are now officially in August, each of those events has now been held. Jan came through with flying colors in her charity effort, but a case of mixed results in my races. The catastrophe that was CMAR was detailed in the previous recollection post (link here). That is still a bitter pill to swallow, especially after today’s training run. Noticed last night the temps were going to drop back into the high 60’sF and decided to head back out to the Illinois Bluff trail to assess the level of damage done from the heat on race day. The internal thermostat out of play, I cruised through 10 miles of the course with little effort – frustrated in my bad weather luck early in the month, but ecstatic that I had not lost the stamina. There is some variability with the 50K weather, however, it is not realistic to expect anything better than HOT/HUMID when it comes to the Bix 7. Based on the earlier beating from the heat, I was less than confident in upcoming 7 miles along the Mississippi River bluff.
Hit the jump to read how the race went and why this race was extra special this year.
Well, I’ve stalled long enough and time to get this race recap out so I can move on to the next challenge. Ever have that one event, be it physical, mental that just seems to have your number. Regardless of how hard you prepare, train, experiment, validate, pray, etc. it seems to always get the best of you. In my case, I can answer that question without hesitation – the Cry Me a River 50K Ultra Trail Run.
I have an embarrassing history with this particular race and this year’s event was held last month. If you would like a cautionary tale of endurance running or simply like living vicariously through the misfortunes of others, hit the jump – caution, there is a “graphic” element.
In a previous post I noted I was knee deep in digital bits trying to get everything transitioned to both the new computer platform and probably more tedious, resetting all the backups/trackers/counters etc. for 2024. The latter feels like I am back at work crunching numbers and traversing through spreadsheet cells. Didn’t really enjoy it back in the grind and certainly have better things to do now that I am not getting paid for it. However, it “has” to be done (wink). It is a nice way for our Intrigued staff to quickly see all the great things we did all year and I know they like to reference it in their end-of-year performance reviews. Truth is, I forgot to publish the 2022 Blog Summary last year. The end of the year was a mess and didn’t want to put my still whining elbow through the countless hours poring over the tracking documents. We just gave the staff all “exceeded” and then picked up the end of the year extravaganza bar tab. Win win I say! (especially for the legal department who are apparently a bunch of lushes). Decided to go ahead and get the 2023 summary done while dealing with PC downloads and file transfer wait times… and yes, my elbow still hurts.
2023 was an in interesting year for sure. Brad and his staff (Jan and Allyson) were old hats by then and regularly cranking out new adventures from their travel filled year. My Intrigued photo queue went ANOTHER year behind thanks to numerous trips to the likes of Texas, Las Vegas, Alabama and Florida. You have to give me some credit though as I was able to get a lot of the new tins out in record time (and now I have 21 new lifer birds from our recent trip to Arizona to add to the backlog – I am sure there are worse problems to have hehehe). We hit our self-imposed quota of at least 6 posts a month and reached all new levels for reader engagement (kudos to our great readers for sharing in our adventures). Still amazed by many of our fellow bloggers that are far more prolific. The birding front was wonderful as well. Hit the 400 lifer plateau and The Average Year (link here) was a huge success. In 2022, both Ron and I came up short on our 300 species goal. 2023 a completely different story. Both cresting over that mark setting even higher goals for this year. Brad also came in strong and will undoubtedly be moving into the Small/Medium Year bracket for this year.
On the flip side of that good news, the race season took a serious hit thanks to the “Root of All Evil” adding the first DNS (Did Not Start) to my racing career. Even though I religiously continued all the therapy exercises while on our trip, it is still not recovered and likely heading back to therapy next week for one last ditch effort before having words with the surgeon. Unfortunately, there were some truly sad times within the extended Intrigued family as Brad and his family lost a beloved family member. 2022 brought a lot of sadness to Linda and I and having our friends go through similar difficulties less than a year later was heartbreaking.
2024 is still young, but shaping up to be a great year. Now in our 17th year of blogging on our Intrigued platforms (The Mothership and its younger sister site Wildlife Intrigued). Several ’24 trips are all lined up (both Linda and I as well as Brad and Jan) – looking forward to bringing you the stories and pictures from our experiences. Hopefully we can continue to grow our presence and always looking forward to the reason we put the work in – to engage our wonderful readers, hearing your feedback, getting your take on our tins and truly learning together.
A few quick shout outs. A big thanks to Linda who has to put up with me (I really am a handful). She is my secret weapon – trip planner, financial wizard, nourishment provider, injury soother, bail provider (just in case hehehe) and truly a bird whisperer. Ron continues to push me on the birding front, dragging me out into the field, helping with those difficult IDs, keeping me posted with opportunities showing up on the birding forums and willing to throw himself in harm’s way to protect me (well, that is what he says…but I’ve seen him run screaming halfway across a field after seeing a Tick). Brad and his team have been a big help in keeping this blog from being work – also does a good job of catching my grammar/syntax errors. In my defense I was forged in the shape of and speak the language of a “coder”. To our staff – you continue to be the best and to all our friends out there spanning the globe, buckle in, 2024 should be a fun ride.
Well, it is time to look back on ’23 and bring you the performance stats. If you are curious about the details, hit the jump to see the 2023 Life Intrigued blogs stats and accomplishments (Mothership and the Wild side).
Thanks again to all my readers that keep us committed month after month. Cheers Everyone! (that is a dry toast of course as the year end extravaganza ran us out ha).
Hi folks, are you up for a night of frights? In the last post I covered some of the prep that goes into bringing our haunted trail to life. It is definitely hard to express just how much work is required to pull this off year after year, but one thing is for sure – I have no idea how we were able to do this while I was still working!! All those years leading up to retirement, I was thinking how much easier the Halloween event was going to be with all those extra hours. I have NO idea where those supposed “extra” hours went as once again we were scrambling right up to the start to get everything in place an operational. The only thing that really matters though is through the invaluable help of amazing people…we got’er done.
Our friend in haunt, Paul, did make our annual teaser video. Feel free to watch that walkthrough and then we’ll take a more static look at the trail after the jump.
The day we look forward to every year has finally arrived and we are giddy with excitement. Some kids grow up looking forward to the more traditional December holiday, we here at Intrigued celebrate the orange and black. The heavy lifting is already done for this season as we hold our haunted trail around the beginning of the month to avoid conflicts with the rest of the parties/events that are scattered across this month. As a result, we get to sit back, relaxing around the flaming pumpkins while watching the ghosts and goblins dance about the place. We wish you similar happiness in whatever manner you choose to celebrate the dark hours.
To help get you in the mood, our “partner in haunt” Paul has already put together our promo video from our recent Haunted Trail. It is impossible to bring you the expansiveness of the trail, but Paul does an excellent job of giving you a feel for the frights and fun to be had in the spooky woods.
Well, crap, I might as well get this post out of the way while I’m lying here still trying to recover. A little over a week ago, I embarked on my 2nd attempt at the 100K ultra distance. This was billed as the redemption year having failed to get this distance checked off last October (link here). For a year that bitter pill hung in my throat and was right there every time I thought about missing a training run or even cutting one short. I knew I needed to be better prepared and more importantly, a better strategy to keep from losing my feet per the last experience.
I know some of you are just curious about the results, so I’ll go ahead and reveal that and get you back on the road. Results: same place, same event, same disappointing results. Once again, fought my way through 50 miles for my third buckle in three years, but opted out of the bonus loop to officially reach the 100K goal. For those of you who want the tortured details, feel free to hit the jump, the rest – see you again next year, same place, same event and hopefully better results!
Life Intrigued 