Tag Archives: boulder

Elvis, Belly Dancers, F-15s, and the Bolder Boulder

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How the 10K road race turned a reluctant walking jogger into an annual participant.

Every Memorial Day, thousands of people from around the world flood the streets of Boulder for an event that’s bigger than a 10K road race. It’s not too late to register. I don’t know if there’s enough space left if all 5,000 of you sign up, but check out more information by clicking on the obligatory Folsom Hill shot.

The Bolder Boulder turns an ordinary Monday morning into a citywide festival where Olympians, walkers, musicians, families, veterans, and people like me all move together toward the same finish line.

I’ve never considered myself a runner.

Back at Carey Junior High, I spent a couple of years on the cross-country team. “Running” might have been too generous a description for what I did.

I survived more than I competed. Between the wheezing and side cramps, I learned, as a 14-year-old, that distance running requires a mindset I didn’t naturally possess.

Regardless, in 2002, I lined up at the Bolder Boulder starting line, soon after 9/11. Here’s a video I shot in 2008 with Elvis. Click on the mugshot from 2025.

I’ve returned every year since then and participated as a walking jogger, a determined and survivor.

I don’t train. The last time I tried to prepare for a race, I twisted my ankle and forfeited my entry fee.

I also carry a media credential, which gives me a different perspective on the event. Instead of focusing only on my own exhaustion, I pay attention to the thousands of stories unfolding around me.

That’s the real race.

Every year, I shoot short video clips along the route and stitch them together into a movie. The Bolder Boulder is a running event from Point A to Point B, combined with a street festival spread across six miles of Boulder neighborhoods. Click on the picture of the Howling Commandos to watch the 2025 non-race highlights.

Recording entertainment is part of my ritual.

The belly dancers on Folsom Hill always draw a crowd. By the time runners reach the top of the incline, many of us need spiritual encouragement.

The music and dancing deliver it.

A little farther along, Elvis appears near the 7-Eleven like a rhinestone-covered guardian angel watching over exhausted runners. You can hear laughter before you even see him.

Then the bagpipes drone before runners enter the stadium. That sound changes everything.

After grinding through the course, hearing those pipes echo in the distance feels cinematic, like a Mel Gibson movie.

The finish is near. The crowd noise swells. Your tired legs suddenly muster up a little extra energy.

Then you enter Folsom Field, where the Buffaloes play football.

Nothing prepares you for that moment the first time you experience it.

Forty thousand cheering fans fill the bleachers. Even if you had walked half the course, even if your knees hurt, even if you questioned your life choices around mile four, entering that stadium makes you feel like an Olympian.

The roar rolls down from the stands and wraps around you. Well-wishers along the rail share “high fives” with the runners passing by.

Everyone’s a champion.

The Bolder Boulder has something for everyone.

World-class elite runners and wheelchair racers from across the globe chase prize money and prestige.

Serious local athletes try to beat personal records. Costumed runners shuffle along in superhero capes. 

Walkers treat the race like a social event. Spectators camp in their front yards, grilling burgers before nine in the morning.

The event belongs equally to the front-of-the-pack Kenyan runner and the guy jogging in a banana costume while carrying a beer.

That’s why I keep coming back.

The race reminds me that participation matters more than perfection.

Memorial Day carries heavy meaning, with F-15s streaking overhead and paratroopers gliding onto the football field carrying flags.

The Bolder Boulder balances remembrance with celebration. It honors sacrifice while celebrating the joy of being alive and moving forward together.

If you’ve ever thought about doing the Bolder Boulder, stop overthinking it. 

You don’t need to be fast. You don’t even need to run much. You just need to show up. I took my mug shot selfie on the right three months after I got up from my deathbed, after six weeks in the hospital, and managed to make my annual Memorial Day rounds.

If I can finish the Bolder Boulder, half-dead and lugging a camera and an oxygen bottle, you can make it!

The course, the crowds, the music, the spectacle, and that unforgettable entrance into Folsom Field will carry you to the finish.

Confessions of an Accidental Environmentalist

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 Turns out reusing microwave popcorn bags now counts as activism.

“Sustainability” is one of those words that started out meaning something specific and useful, then got run through enough marketing departments that it now sounds like a yoga retreat sponsored by a bank.

Back in the 1990s, the term actually had practical roots. I received a grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to use the Northern Arapaho Farm as a model for agricultural sustainability. EPA researchers promoted sustainable ag as a way for farmers and ranchers to remain economically viable.

Less fertilizer. Less pesticide. Less diesel. No-till seed drilling. Better water management. The idea was to stop going broke buying chemicals and fuel.

The environmental benefits were incidental. If you used fewer inputs, there was less poisonous and nitrogen runoff into streams and less soil erosion. Farmers got to keep more money. Everybody won.

That made sense to me.

Somewhere along the line, though, “sustainability” became a lifestyle brand.

The word appears on luxury condos, imported bottled water, and pricey organic kale chips shipped across three continents in a refrigerated truck.

Everything’s now “sustainable.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing my own version of sustainability since the 1970s.

I’m not virtuous.

I’m cheap.

I haven’t used a store-bought trash bag since the Carter administration. Why would I? Grocery stores used to hand out perfectly good plastic bags for free.

Now that these bags cost a dime, I’ve adapted.

I now use patient “Personal Belongings” bags. Hospitals send your stuff home in large sturdy plastic sacks with drawstrings. Those things are practically military grade. You could store bowling balls in them. I reuse each one multiple times. Of course, I don’t account for the fact that the hospital probably billed my insurance company $50 for each one.

Every morning, I fill a reusable Keurig cup with coffee. I’m not saving the Earth. I refuse to pay sixty-five cents for a thimbleful of coffee sealed in a tiny plastic chalice engineered by NASA.

Spent Keurig cups aren’t safe from my program. I disassemble them like I’m operating a tiny recycling center in the kitchen.

Plastic and foil in the recycling bin. Coffee grounds in the compost.

By the time I’m done, I’ve spent seven minutes salvaging the components.

Even Moon the cat has become part of the operation.

Cleaning her litter box is now a daily exercise in supply chain management. I save unrecyclable bags from tortilla chips, frozen vegetables, shredded cheese, and microwave popcorn. Commercially available unscented or scented cat poop bags run around fifteen cents each.

The plastic wrap from meat trays gets reused, too. Most people peel that stuff off and throw it away. Not me. I rinse it off and freeze leftovers with it later. Plastic wrap at Safeway costs three bucks for 200 square feet, a penny a square foot. Still, $3 us $3.

My ancestors who lived through the Great Depression are nodding proudly.

Financially, none of this may pencil out, but it feels correct.

That’s why I prefer the word “efficient” over “sustainable.” Efficient means getting the most out of what you have.

I don’t think of myself as “green,” but more as “cheap.”

Somewhere in America, sustainability experts are discussing circular waste streams and post-consumer reuse initiatives.

Being cheap has diverted more stuff from landfills than half the public and private sustainability reports ever printed.

Reflections on Lent: A Journey Through Texas

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It’s the middle of Lent. Lent is a 40-day, solemn Christian season of fasting, prayer, and repentance that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends before Easter. It honors Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. Common practices include giving up luxuries. I grew up as a Presbyterian and knew about Lent, but didn’t practice the rituals.

These days, I still don’t practice Lent, except to give a couple of hours each morning and respond to Lenten writing prompts. I recently returned from a long drive through the Longhorn State and didn’t forego eating beef.

Jeremiah writes that those who trust in flesh are like shrubs in the desert, unable to see relief when it comes.

Desert language is appropriate for Lent.

What gives me relief is a change of scenery.

A few hundred miles between my real world in Boulder and wherever I happen to be, life continues in Colorado without me. The inbox fills. The deadlines creep closer.

When I leave town, I get to step into someone else’s ordinary life.

I’m in Texas on my way to Galveston to shoot footage for a documentary. The first night, Amarillo was a seven-hour drive. I had to stop at the Big Texan Steak Ranch, which also has a motel where I stayed, and is also home to the 72-ounce steak challenge. Finish it in an hour, and it’s free. Fail, and you pay $72.

I didn’t attempt it. The steak would have eaten me.

Instead, I listened to five men and a woman next to me, who talked in thick drawls about their trade show. Diners are seated family style at long tables. I asked the server how many challengers down the steak with all the fixings. Oddly, she didn’t know. Curious, I found out 100,000 determined eaters try, and 10,000 get a free steak.

The next morning and seven hours later, I pulled into Fredericksburg, with its German storefronts and tidy sidewalks. There were vineyards around the area, and I ended up at the Wine Country Inn. No wine tasting, though. I like to watch the local TV news. The lead story was the Senate “Democrat” primary. Mild-mannered James Talarico defeated sound-bite firebrand, Jasmine Crockett. Meanwhile, Senator John Cornyn eked out a plurality over ultra-right challenger Ken Paxton.

Same country as Colorado. Different political weather systems. Speaking of weather systems, it’s rained nonstop since I’ve been in Texas, compared to Boulder’s drought. I’m on the Watch Duty app that sends me notices about natural disasters and notified me about a fire near Heil Ranch, a few miles north of Boulder.

Last night I ate hockbraten at Altdorf Biergarten, bacon-wrapped meatloaf smothered under mushroom gravy. My server was from Germany, with an accent thick enough to make me feel like I was in Frankfurt. I’m not a devotee of German food, but it was pretty good, very earthy.

This morning, I’ll be back on the highway, dodging flatbeds carrying wind turbine blades, wide oil field equipment parts, and enormous John Deere discs creeping down the road with occasional passing lanes.

I’ve been catching up on my audiobooks. I listened to “First Frost” by Craig Johnson, which has a Japanese incarceration camp as a backdrop. Now I’m listening to one called “White Trash” about the origins of the white and gender class systems in America that dates back to indentured servitude in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Travel slows down my life. Audiobooks fill the void I would otherwise fill with thoughts about whatever might be happening back home.

When Jeremiah warns about trusting in flesh, I wonder whether my leaving town is a pilgrimage or an anesthetic escape with different scenery?

Distance reminds me that the world is larger than my preoccupations. It places me inside other people’s lives and places.

No matter how many miles I add between Boulder and Galveston, I still bring myself along for the ride.

No matter where I go, there I am.

On Saturday, I turn around and head back to Boulder.

This time I’m taking a different route home.

Maybe that’s the point. Lent asks for reorientation. The inbox will be filled with the usual Spams and Scams. I still have to finish a grant application, but I will have arrived changed. How that looks, I don’t know yet.

Time does slow down. That extra space gives me a place to learn how to return.