JMT2: School's Out

With my last day of virtual school in the rearview mirror after the morning’s less-than-spectacular AP test, I hit the trails in the early evening for Day 2, and decided to head over to one of the more popular trails in Mill Valley, Old Railroad Grade. With no rain in sight today, I headed out - with my phone this time (sigh) - for a relaxing evening on a classic route.

Today’s route saw me run down my street, over to Corte Madera (the street, not the town), past Miller Grove and deep into the depths of Mill Valley to the bottom of Old Railroad Grade. One of the most beloved biker and runner spots around, it was a busy evening on the fire road.

Let me take somewhat of a historical tangent here: Old Railroad Grade gets its name from the late 19th century railroad nicknamed “The Crookedest Railroad in the World” that was carved into the mountain on this very path. It snakes its way up from this trailhead, intercepts with the top of my own street, Summit Avenue, and continues on Railroad Grade (why this portion is not deemed “old”, I couldn’t tell you) for another 4+ miles before arriving at the East Peak Visitor Center. As a consistent, gradual climb originally meant for the railroad’s signature “Gravity Cars,” it makes for awesome, albeit grueling, running and biking. Today, I covered the stretch from the trailhead at the valley floor to the point at which Old Railroad Grade meets up with Summit Avenue at a point that I like to call “Mounnow” (inside joke, don’t worry about it), a stretch of ~1.7 miles and nearly 800 feet of climbing.

As is always the case when I run on my own, my thoughts roamed wild out there today. For those of you who aren’t long distance runners, the trails are a crazy place for your noggin, one where your mind has free rein. Before I came up with this project, I seriously contemplated creating a podcast titled Things I Think About When I Run before I realized that absolutely nobody thought that was a good idea except for me.

Anyways, today I was contemplating what a cool acronym might be for my project, something that I could include in the title of each of my activities on Strava and in my runner’s guide in progress. My first thought was PP, for Passion Project, but my childhood education of Captain Underpants led me to believe that it sounded like I was just being immature. I entertained the idea of RIP, Running in Place, until realizing that this is already a pretty widely used acronym for other purposes. For a while, I settled on the idea of PWCA, for Project Without a Cool Acronym, based off of the spy agency that Perry the Platypus works for in Phineas and Ferb named OWCA (Organization Without a Cool Acronym). From there, I mostly lost focus and reminisced about old episodes of Phineas and Ferb, which I still maintain that everybody should watch.

Somewhere close to the top of the trail, I thought of JMT as a possibility. JMT, for “Jonathan on Mount Tam” or “Jonathan’s Mount Tam (Runner Guide)” or “Jonathan likes Moose Tracks ice cream” or something along those lines, I’m not exactly sure. I’ll make it up as I go. Because in the end, that’s another thing that this project is all about: making it up as I go, and enjoying the ride along the way.

Before I knew it, the climb concluded and I found myself snapping this mediocre iPhone photo from Mounnow and chuckling to myself on the trip down my street about all the outrageous things I would put in this blog post later on. Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow!

👊✌️

Jonathan