About FlyRun Dot Fun
This blog might be in a bit of a niche. It’s about travel, and flying in particular, and about running, and half marathons in particular.
Lots of people are interested in travel. Lots of people are interested in running. But both? Hmmm. The numbers go down.
However, you don’t have to be interested in it all to get something out of it. If you are interested in travel, and aviation in particular, or in running, you might find it worth subscribing (for free). My aim is to provide information, reviews, vignettes, and ideas for people who are interested in this sort of thing. Plus some posts on tangential topics.
I started to run in 2012, in my fifties. Earlier, I’d only run if I had to grab a cab on a rainy night. And then barely. At the private school I attended in the UK where I grew up, running was, literally, a punishment. The first time I ran two miles as an adult — accompanied for moral support by my then 9-year-old son on his bicycle — I recall feeling I still needed to get my wind back an hour or two later.
But I made it a mission. I ran my first half marathon several months later, finishing in around two hours and 35 minutes. And by the end of 2023, I’d run over 70 of them. Not to mention 10K races.
These days, I’m usually somewhere in the middle of the pack and generally somewhere in the top half of my age/gender division. I’ve gone below two hours in a half marathon once and am usually not much over. I run not to compete with others, but with my own times. But the collective energy of a race makes me go faster. My favorite races have been — and continue to be — ones with my kids. My first with my daughter was the Boston Half in 2016. And my first with my son was the Anchorage Half in 2021. But destinations also make races memorable.
I empty nested in 2022. And resolved to mark that transition by taking part in races that require getting on an airplane. I’d done some of that before, but most of my races prior to fall 2022 were within driving distance of my home in Southern California. Now, most are elsewhere — and many are overseas.
You see, aside from running, travel and aviation are two of my other passions. I have been to almost 100 countries. I am an instrument-rated private pilot, although no longer active.
I’ve flown as a passenger on everything from Concorde to Air Koryo (the North Korean airline). One of my most memorable flights was on my honeymoon in 1992 when my wife and I took an internal flight in Cambodia. This was when memories of the killing fields were still fresh. The flight was apparently oversold. But rather than leave anyone behind, they had about a dozen passengers stand, like on a crowded subway. It put a twist on the term “standby.”
My wife is an airline pilot. The “non-rev” standby travel benefits we get on her airline and others make flying to run on a regular basis a more feasible option than it would otherwise be. But over my life, I’ve also done a lot of travel as a revenue passenger. I’ve got over two million miles on American and its partners. I actually like airports. Airport lounges — the nice type you enter through those enticing, often frosted-glass automatically sliding doors — are my happy place.
So that’s what this blog is about. Traveling by air to run in the US and overseas, but also travel, aviation, and running generally.
Navigation: Check out the Archive section for older posts. The posts on the main “Home” landing page only go back about a couple of months unless you click the “See all” link at the bottom.
To help you find content of interest, the navigation bar also breaks out posts into three categories according to their main focus — “Race reviews,” “Other running” (referring to running posts that aren’t race reviews), and “Travel/aviation.” But many posts are a bit of a hybrid — for example, most of the race reviews have something of a travelog built in. ✈️ 🏃
Why subscribe? It’s free to subscribe. If you subscribe, you’ll get a newsletter email every couple of months or so telling you a bit about some recent posts and with links to them. I do not send out emails every time new content is posted on this blog. And I promise not to bombard you with emails. Subscribing keeps you in the loop, helps raise the visibility of this blog, and incentivizes me to post. Product links on this site do not earn me commission, by the way.
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About the FlyRun “dot fun” domain name: “Dot com” was up for sale for some ridiculous amount. I thought about some other options, such as “dot world.” But “dot fun” made sense. “Fun” rhymes with “run.” And, ultimately, it is all for fun.
Contact: flyrun@substack.com
