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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything of substance on here and as it turns out, this is not going to be the time to break the silence (I mean, honestly, does anybody really want to hear my rants and raves?).  But I thought I’d post a little update for all of you who were curious/skeptical of my continued existence…

I’m back in Alaska!  I made it…actually I made it a week and a half ago.  I made the drive north again and this time I was alone.  Very alone.  Alone for FORTY-FIVE HOURS OF DRIVE TIME…THREE WHOLE DAYS!!!!  I was having some good conversations with myself by the end.  I also ran into (not literally) a herd of buffalo and several reindeer…so check ‘em off the Alaska Wildlife Checklist!

But I made it…only to find that the housing that I thought I was moving into is not going to work out, i.e. the cabin currently consists of only exterior walls with little hope of being finished before winter.  So, I’ve been looking around for others options and I think that I’ve found a nice, cozy little cabin just a mile away from the school.  Should be just enough space for me…a loft to sleep in, a little kitchen/living room downstairs complete with a gas fireplace.  I’ll be moving in later this week.

I ran a race on Saturday: the Lost Lake Run.  It was a nice mountain, trail run…about sixteen miles, nine up and seven down.  Next up, Kenai River Marathon on September 26.

I’m currently spending my time trying to prepare courses, working on the spiritual life component of the year, and generally getting settled and revved up for when students show up in a week and a half…woah.

Anyway, that’s all the news for the moment.  I’ll be in touch again before too long…but now I need to get to work.

Yes, as we have just rolled over not one but two numbers on the calendar, I thought maybe we should take a look back at the past ten years to see where we’ve gone.  I mean, a lot has happened.  Ten years ago at midnight, I was standing on the hill above Twisp waiting for the lights to go out…oh, Y2K, you really threw us for a loop.

So here’s a list of the top ten best things (or at least interesting things) that happened in the past decade:

10.  I graduated from high school!  And college!  And grad school!

9.  Ran the London Marathon and broke the 2:40 barrier (also ran three other marathons this decade…shooting for ten in the next decade!)

8.  Played with a crazy monkey while living in Ecuador for a year, working at Covenant Bible College.  Also went spelunking with a one-legged man.  Also climbed a 19k+ ft mountain: Cotopaxi.

7.  Travelled all around Europe…from Norway to Greece and everywhere in between!

6.  More and more running…running in high school, running in college, running aftercollege…lots of good times, good races, good people…in the Mountains in Winthrop, on the beach in Santa Barbara, on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, through the streets of London, through the hills of Thailand, getting chased by dogs in Ecuador, getting stress fractures in the summers…is it sad that I spend so much time at this activity?  I don’t think so.  It’s provided some pretty incredible moments.

5.  Went to Thailand for a four months and loved it…lived in a tribal village, ate great food, had crazy adventures.

4.  Spent a year in Scotland doing my masters degree.  Hung out with some great folks, explored higher theology, got started in professional coffee making.

3.  Worked on a llama ranch in Colorado for the summer after college.  Also fought forest fires for a couple of summers…hence my alter ego: Fuego.

2.  Spent a year with the Canby Community learning to live well.

1.  Learned a lot about life, about God, about people, about myself.

Goals for the next decade: 1.  Get a Ph.D., 2.  Run sub-2:30 in a marathon, 3. Spend another year living overseas, 4. Live well.

I was talking to a friend here at the Canby House (I’m still in Portland for my Christmas Break) the other day and he was commenting on how 2009 was an eventful year.  I proceeded to think to myself, “Wow.  2009 was a pretty boring year for me!”  I mean, it’s not that nothing happened, but it really was kind of just a normal year (whereas the last several have been quite eventful).  Moving to Alaska was kind of the only big momentous thing.  So here’s a list of the top ten small but meaningful things that happened to me this year.

10.  The Canby House community garden project was a success!  Though I wasn’t there to reap many of the fruits of my labor, it was a great experiment that taught me a lot and allowed for

some great time and conversations with great people and plus it felt good just to spend a lot of time outside and getting dirty.

9.  Spent a day with Cousin Shannon hiking around Multnomah Falls and having lunch at McMenamins Edgefield.

8.  I spent a lot of good time with Cousin Jesse and Now-Cousin-In-Law Jen…two people who are great and who I hadn’t seen a lot within the past decade/hadn’t really gotten to know well at all.

7.  I won a marathon.  Granted there were only about 25 people in the race.  Granted my time was twenty-seven minutes slower (that’s one minute per mile) than my previous slowest time…but I WON!

6.  I traveled into the Alaskan Bush to the village of Shaktoolik…a very eye opening experience.

5.  I took on a job that I actually enjoy!  Let’s hear it for jobs with intellectual stimulation!

4.  I got to spend several days with my whole family in the Methow back in April.  I hadn’t seen my brother Ben’s family in almost two years and it had been three years since we had all been together.

3.  East of Eden entered my list of the best books ever written.

2.  When I was driving up to Alaska with my cousin Jesse, somewhere near the Alaska/Canada border at about 3am, we pulled over to the side of the road to look at the northern lights.  It was pretty cool.  But then it got even better when meteors were shooting across them.  Spectacular.

1.  Lots of good time spent with great people doing nothing particularly special but just enjoying wonderful fellowship.  Thanks everybody!

1. Sunrise was at 10am this morning.  Certainly, dawn arrived much earlier, but I still tend to get this feeling that I’m in some sort of ethereal time-warp.
2. Yesterday was the winter’s first ski.  It felt good.  I’m about to head out for the winter’s second ski.
3. Healing takes time.  One of the advantages of being up here at ACC is that I get to take advantage of professional counseling from the counseling center.  So I’ve been going.  And I’ve been realizing that some scars still run pretty deep.  But I’m also starting to see that maybe the point isn’t to get rid of them but to be shaped by them.  After I got a stress fracture in college from overtraining, I had to learn how to run again, how to train again…I couldn’t go about things in the same way and expect to not get hurt again…and even now, when I start training hard, that same spot, the left tibia, sometimes acts up and I have to be careful.  Maybe emotional injuries work the same way.  Be careful, learn from it, be shaped by it, but never forget it, never act as though it isn’t still a deep part of me.
4. My application to Duke’s Ph.D. program is all submitted.  Now I get to wait around for a couple of months to see if I’m even in the running.
5. N.T. Wright is a phenomenal thinker.  I’m getting close to finishing Justification and though it’s a pretty heady book, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to believe that maybe the message of Jesus is better than even we imagined.  I never used to like Paul much…but Wright is convincing me that I need to give him a new, better, more informed reading.
6. Somehow I’ve found myself “in charge” of organizing worship at the new The River Covenant Church plant here in Soldotna.  Challenging.
7. The semester is coming to an end.  Ethics was discussing food last week.  I ended on this topic because it ties together a lot of the other issues and shows how they are connected.  We are going to watch a documentary tomorrow, Food, Inc. I recommend that you all see it.  It will change the way that you think about what you eat and it demonstrates those connections to many other ethical issues.  Final exams next week.
8. I’m headed home in less than two weeks.  And by home I mean Portland and then Winthrop for a little while and then back to Portland to fly back here to Alaska.  Hope to see many of you then.

Winter.  It’s here.  No doubt about it anymore.  We were flirting with it for a while…on again, off again.  But now, I think it’s here to stay.

I didn’t realize how cold it was on Sunday when I decided to go for a run.  But before too long, I figured it out…somewhere between the burning sensation in my lungs and the fact that my legs were numb despite my sleek running tights.

I never looked at the temperature, but I’m guessing it was somewhere around 5 degrees.  That’s Fahrenheit.  But wait…it gets better.  When I woke up Monday morning to drive to work, the thermometer was registering at about -15.  That’s FIFTEEN BELOW ZERO!  IT’S ONLY NOVEMBER!!  I can see this happening in the depths of the Arctic winter that will be upon us soon enough, but we haven’t even hit Thanksgiving yet.  Ah, Alaska.

By 1pm, it had warmed up to a toasty 4 below.

I elected to refrain from running yesterday.

Today doesn’t look good either.

Back down to -15 today.  Almost noon and we’re showing -10.

Good news is that we’ve got a hot streak coming in over the next few days.  We’re going to be gong up to about 16 ABOVE (!!) on Thursday and then continuing up a bit through the weekend and hopefully getting a bit of snow dropped on us.  With any luck, I’ll be skiing by this time next week.

To start off…This is a shout out to everybody who came to cheer and give me high-fives: Erin, Carolyn, Ian, Scott and his kids, Jaber, Jaala, Justin, John and Kristin and Lydia and Justice, Sean and Shannon, and the whole crowd of students who showed up at the finish line (albeit after I had crossed the line…it’s the thought that counts)…and a GIANT shout out, thank you, and tip o’ the hat to John and Kristin for half an apple and to the nice lady who’s name I didn’t get for giving me half her granola bar!  Thanks folks!

Well, I ran the Kenai River Marathon yesterday…and I finished.  But not much more.  Ok, ok, so I actually won the race by about twenty minutes which sounds pretty amazing until you hear that I finished in about 3 hours 12 minutes and that there were about twenty people running the race…not exactly London 2008.  But I did make the front page of the Kenai Peninsula newspaper! (That headline to the left is not about me…yet…)

Yeah so anyway, it was a rather cold day…about 45 degrees for the high.  I was in long sleeves and gloves for the whole race which normally would drive me nuts, but I eventually reached some equilibrium and it worked.  I took the lead in the race at about the third step away from the starting line and after about a mile and a half I never saw anyone again.  So it was a rather lonely race…really more of just a long run.

The strange thing was that this was the first distance race I’ve been in (I mean of a significant distance) that did not have Gatorade or some sort of sugar/electrolyte replacement/energy at the aid stations.  So, after about 20 miles, my legs started to feel quite depleted and I for the first time in my life had to actually stop and walk for part of the race…I actually physically could not continue running.  Crazy.

Fortunately, John (and his family) came to my rescue.  John is my boss…the Academic Vice President at ACC and he and his family were nice enough to come out and cheer me on at about 21 miles.  So when I came stumbling past him and frantically asked if he had any food at all, he managed to produce an apple…SAVED!   It (along with the half a granola bar from the above mentioned nice lady) gave me the sugars I needed to make it the last few miles.  After a few minutes, it started to kick in and I was able to pick it up to a slightly faster than jog pace to get in to the finish line in about 3:12.

Not my fastest race ever, but it’ll do.  I’ve got 2009 under my belt.  I estimate I now have eight years left to break 2:30 before I hit my peak.  Time to start training.