Getting off the mat and into Bay to Breakers

Tortillas litter the ground on the
Bay to Breakers Starting Line

There's the old sports cliche', it's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get off the mat. I'd say I got off the mat rather slowly and deliberately after shredding my left hip in the Napa Valley Marathon last March. It took nearly four weeks after the marathon before I tried running again, and that just a slow hobble of a lap around a track for a grand total of 1/4 mile.  From there, I slowly, and at times painfully, built up from there to a half mile, then one mile, then two miles, and finally 3-4 miles started feeling pretty manageable. I'm not sure which were tougher: Those 20 miler training runs for the marathon, or those 3 mile runs on a day my left hip could only hold together for about a mile.

I was already signed for Bay to Breakers since last fall, so recovering enough to tackle the mid-May 12 kilometer race was the goal.  Day after day of careful runs and twisting myself into bunch of odd, awkward positions to stretch and strengthen the hip, I finally got to the point of completing 8 mile run with hip holding up pretty well. So was pretty confident I could handle whatever Bay to Breakers could throw at me.

And handle it I did. Bay to Breaker is one big San Francisco-themed mob scene of a race, a flow of humanity from the east side of the city to the western edge of Golden Gate Park. The idea was to just go with that flow. I had a modest goal of finishing under 7:30 per mile pace, a little less modest goal of finishing under 7:15 per mile pace, but basically, I just wanted to put in a strong effort for 7.45 miles. At the top of Hayes Hill, a check of my watch had me at just over 7:30 pace at three miles and I wasn't feeling so good. Not an encouraging sign, but I just kept working on getting my knees up, found a second wind, and started zipping through the latter downhill miles in sub-7:00 minute pace, finishing in 52:45 with little soreness in my hip the whole way. That's something like 7:04 per mile pace, faster than I figured to do. I'll take it.

Next race up, Santa Cruz's Wharf to Wharf on the fourth Sunday of July. I'll leave you with a few pictures from Bay to Breakers I snapped with my iPhone.

Tortillas fill the air at the starting line

Star Wars costumes were popular.  Just ahead of me
were a bunch of fast Princes Leia's

Folks are queued up for the beer lunge

A race well run calls for a beer.

The Inspired Brews of Fieldwork....now in Edible East Bay

Barry Braden (l)  and Alex Tweet (r) of Fieldwork

One of the cool things that comes with writing about beer is that I get to meet the people behind my favorite breweries. Like Barry Braden and Alex Tweet, co-founders of Berkeley's Fieldwork, who generously gave their time one afternoon to discuss how their brewery came to be and how they concoct their brews. They do some pretty novel things with hops....and sea salt...and other things like coconut. I enjoyed telling their for a story in the current issue of Edible East Bay and hope you enjoy reading it. You can find it here:

The Inspired Brews at Fieldwork

Rambling Reviews 5.17.2016 : Boulevard's Tell Tale Tart, Anderson Valley's Briney Melon Gose, and Coronado Brewing's Berry the Hatchet

It's the time again to ramble on about some new beers encountered on my travels, this time with a bit of fruit theme,

Let's start with Tell Tale Tart, from Boulevard Brewing. What a wonderfully balanced composition of simplicity this is. There's a little musty funk, a little sweetness, some fruity esters and some sourness that create an excellent warm afternoon sipping beer. I applaud Boulevard for resisting the temptation to dump boysenberries, tamarind or some other fruit or spice addition that just doesn't belong there. It's nearly perfect as it is.

And then there is Anderson Valley's Briney Melon Gose. As you might expect, there's noticeable melon flavors, barely detectable saltiness and almost no sour tang. Well, it's balanced. When the Gose style came on the scene a couple years ago as, a wonderful breath of fresh salty-sour air. Anderson Valley's Gose, and I mean just Gose without any fruit added, was one of the best. But it seems like the Gose has now become just a general purpose fruit beer. I was a bit on the fence about Anderson Valley's Blood Orange Gose and really under whelmed by Sierra Nevada's Otra Vez Gose.  Briney Melon Gose works as fruit beer and I enjoyed drinking it.  But I'm missing that yin-yang salty/sour balance that made the Gose style so enticing. Now, breweries are just dumping fruit and spices into their Gose and upsetting that balance. German brewers buried in Leipzig have every right to be spinning in their graves.

Finally, we come to Berry the Hatchet from Coronado Brewing, which sent me a sample of this beer to try. They take a light touch with the fruit and wisely brew this with little sweetness, lest this become syrupy tasting. There's a nice complexity to the berry flavors if you concentrate hard on them, and they end with a satisfying tartness. I suspect beer geeks will be a little underwhelmed, but the other 99% of the population will be just fine with this summer thirst quencher which at 4.6% abv, is rather sessionable.

The Session #111: Surviving a Beer Midlife Crisis

For this month's Session, Oliver Gray asks us fellow beer hobbyists whether or not we're dealing with a beer mid life crisis. Certainly a navel gazing Session topic if there ever was one, but then, if we don't gaze at our navels once in awhile, what's the point of blogging?

I found Oliver's invitation for self-indulgence irresistible given that:

a) I actually went through a real mid-life crisis.
b) With my other hobby, running, I've gone through several different periods of varying enthusiasm over the 36 years I've been involved with the sport.

Let's talk about my mid-life crisis for a second. A little over ten years ago, I went through a divorce, started seeing a therapist, and nearly hit rock bottom. Unfortunately, my finances were got pretty messy so I couldn't afford the obligatory mid-life crisis sports car.
It wasn't until I could change certain perspectives and attitudes that I started turning things around. Sometimes, a change in enthusiasm is a good thing because it signals some sort of personal growth or evolution. But losing interest in something you once loved can also be a bad thing, indicating some sort of general discontentment or unresolved conflict. So it's wise to take notice of any change of enthusiasm over any subject or activity and ask yourself "Why?". OK, that's enough amateur psychology.

Now let's talk about running. When I was twelve, my dad and I trained for a local 10 kilometer (6.2 mile) race. From there, I kept running, dreaming about being an Olympic athlete in my teens. When it became clear by age 18 those Olympic dreams weren't going to work out, I still held out that some day with a lot of hard work, I could at least become one of the top 100 or so runners in the country. That didn't turn out either and by my early 30's, due to a whole bunch of things related to my mid-life crisis, I was barely running and sixty pounds heavier. One way out of those dark days was to get running again, albeit with a new outlook. Now, in my late 40's, I'll never be as fast or as strong as I ever was, but I still go out the door each morning and get a few miles in, and I still enjoy competing in a few races each year.

I must still love running, because there's no other explanation for continuing to do something that at my age, inevitability causes one or more parts of my body to become sore on a regular basis. When getting together with runners my age, the conversation invariably turns to all the nagging injuries we're dealing with. You may wonder what motivates me to continue to engage in this form of self abuse after all these years. Well, running keeps me fit, there's that nice buzz of endorphins that gets me through the day, and there's that sense of accomplishment thing. There other reasons that keep me running, but I'd like to keep those between me and my therapist.

But the important thing is, my approach to running has changed a lot over those 36 years since I've changed a lot myself. Running on the other hand, has remained static. Oh sure, there have been some incremental changes in nutrition, training techniques, running shoes, and you can buy a lot more fancy running gadgets today than you could 30 years ago. But the sport still retains it's simplicity of putting one foot in front of the other and repeating this over and over again to propel yourself as fast as you can over some distance.

While running hasn't changed much in the past 36 years, beer has changed plenty in just the last decade. There was a time when it seemed a reasonable goal to sample the  beers from all the different breweries throughout the country. Now, just attempting this in Northern California alone would involve basically quitting my job, leaving my family, and dying of alcohol poisoning three months later. A bar with 8-10 "craft" beers on tap was once considered a destination craft beer bar I would travel considerable distance to visit. Now this pretty much describes any bar in my neighborhood. I used to explain to my friends with an IPA or Saison was. Now, they're all coming up to me, recommending their favorites I ought to try.

I find these changes in the beery landscape liberating. No longer am I some evangelist, preaching my cause to the unresponsive masses. I no longer feel guilty missing a beer festival, since there's no way I could attend all of them, and there's plenty of new ways to discover new beers or reacquaint myself with the old favorites. With too many breweries to get to know all of them, I just pick and chose the ones I find the most interesting.

One thing I've discovered from this writing blog is how enjoyable it is simply talking with brewers about their beers and breweries. There's plenty more brewers to talk to now than there were 10 years ago, and thus, I'm having far more of these great conversations than I ever did. And yes, I do find the latest wave of corporate forays into craft beer fascinating. The story of craft beer used to be a tired cliche' of David vs. Goliath. Now, it's a nuanced story of complex characters with noble sounding motives but possibly hidden agendas, engaged in careful yet often dramatic maneuvers, creating both new apprehension and optimism. Good and evil is no longer clear cut. Some clearly find these new messier new realities troubling compared to a more simplified past. I can understand why many people find economically driven brewing business developments boring, or even threatening. As for myself, I can't get enough of it.

So these days, I'm no longer breathlessly posting about some new brewpub I've been to. That seems so 2012. There are far more stories about beer and breweries than there were just five years ago to discovering and writing about. This is one of most fascinating times in the history of beer, and if beer bloggers exist a hundred years from now, I expect they'll be writing about how our era dramatically transformed beer as we know it.

So I understand why lots of people, possibly including our host Oliver, might find themselves less committed to beer than they used too.  And that's OK.  But as for me, just like running, my relationship with beer is constantly changing, but has never been stronger.

Rambling Reviews 5.2.2106: Strike Brewing's Screaming Hand, Uinta Brewing's Farm Side Saison, and Dogfish Head's Beer To Drink Music To

It's been a full month since I rambled here about any beer. Time to fix that!

Let's start with Strike Brewing's Screaming Hand Imperial Amber coming totally out of left field on Strike's restrained, baseball themed line-up. I alway found Strike beers to be driven by Brewmaster Drew Ehrlich's solid brewing technique and sense of nuance, but this beer almost literally screams. Assertive, strong caramel malt blend well with tropical slightly resinous hops. At 7.5% abv, it tastes a bit "boozy" in a good way. Nice change of pace effort from Strike. Talk to the hand.

Next, we come to Uinta Brewing's Farm Side Saison. They make it with white grape must and gooseberries, which pretty much take over this brew. It's full of sharp, white wine flavors, a fruity tartness that I gather come from the gooseberries. There's just not much there from the neutral malt, and it lacks any real yeastiness. You might call it a white wined-up saison. For those who want some wine with their beer.

Last, we come to Beer to Drink Music to Tripel from Dogfish Head.  What can I say, this is just a wonderful sipping beer to drink music to, or anything else for that matter.  Lot's of aromatic spiciness of cinnamon and clove dominate with a little orange fruitiness, a light sweetness and a slight toffee note.  Just a smooth, effortless combination of strong flavors at 9% abv.