Ean Jackson's blog

It's fun to run the trails in the winter because it's so invigorating. It's fun to run them in the spring because everything is so fresh and green. Trail running in the summer is awesome because you don't need many clothes. Fall is great because the woods smell like leaves and there's a cool nip in the air. I also love fall for the mushrooms.

I've always been an entrepreneur:  I shoveled snow, cut lawns, bought and sold postage stamps as a kid and always had some moonlighting thing or another going on after joining the workforce.

Since promising myself I'd never work for anyone else again in June 2000, I've been a true entrepreneur.  Apart from not having a paycheck, to me the definition of "entrepreneur" included having a home office and a flexible schedule that could accommodate noon hour runs in the sun and drop in visits by running buddies at all hours of the day.

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago I got my first technical t-shirt. I can’t recall which race it was, but I do remember being as happy as pie to get something other than a cotton t-shirt as an enduring souvenir of the event.

It's been an awesome week of gorgeous fall weather. Rather than being out smelling the autumn leaves on the trails, I spent the better part of the week dragging my sorry ass around the house with a messed-up foot.

'Ever tried cleaning the garage while hopping on one leg? I managed to shift a few piles of paper from one drawer to another and whittle the InBox down to 60 messages before going nuts and stuffing a heavily-bandaged foot into my Montrails.

The doctor said start with 15 minutes and stop if the bones start to crunch. She said add 10% per week.

For the past year, I've had a bad foot. After months of X-rays, bone scans, diagnoses from doctors, physiotherapists, podiatrists and a few quacks, I learned I had Plantar Fasciitis.

Last week was an 80+ hour work week.  It was a good week for getting through the papers that had been piling up on on my desks and all over the floor of my office.  I whittled my email In-Box down from 287 messages to 82.  I got back to most of the folks who had left voice mail messages.  I brought a project almost to completion and got some headway into year-end accounting paperwork while listening to tunes from Zimbabwe on the Internet at 2:00 am.  It was, however, not a great week for running.

One of the reasons I run is so I can do stuff like the Forbidden Forest Run. This is a photo from the finish of the 2005 FFR and that's Scott Riddell, Dom Repta and Tim Wiens about to go for a well-deserved pint.

True, it's dark. In fact, it was inky dark. We are also running on trails... something most runners wouldn't think of doing in the night out of fear of falling and breaking their necks.

Saturday was a great day: I got in my longest run in over a year (somewhere around 40K), I explored some previously unknown terrain with a couple of buddies, bagged a peak... and I believe I contributed toward saving a guy's life!

Saturday was the inaugural Squamish Scrambler. I was really keen to do this because for as long as I can remember, I've wanted to climb the magnificent Diamond Head (Attwell Peak) that towers above Squamish, BC. This would be a run to the neighboring Little Diamond Head.