The stray dog joined David and Amy on the sixth day into their journey and was just the diversion they needed to make the miles a bit less tedious and painful.

The last of five articles, each about a different national park the author visited during the summer of 2017.

This is the fourth of five articles, each about a different national park the author visited during the summer of 2017.

There’s something about standing on the side of the highway in Iceland hitchhiking with your wife that has a way of bringing you together. We stood there in the kind of storm where at any moment it will literally start raining cats and dogs.

This is the third of five articles, each about a different national park the author visited during the summer of 2017.

This is the second of five articles, each about a different National Park the author visited during the summer of 2017.

This is the first of five articles, each about a different National Park the author visited during the summer of 2017. Up next: Grand Teton National Park. 

Visit New York and you’ll find a variety of trail and ultra events, a passionate running community and some very special history.

The Trail Verbier St. Bernard is a series of trail races in the mountains surrounding Verbier, Switzerland. The X-Alpine race at 110 kilometers is the longest race with the Grand Traversée being the next longest in the series at about 65k and just under 14,000 net gain.

An 85-kilometer, point-to-point race in the remote mountains near Westport, New Zealand. The race’s entire 53 miles are run on a brand new trail called the Old Ghost Road, its isolation is so complete that from start to finish, one does not cross a road or another trail.

This run in Nicaragua takes you over two volcanos while traveling around the island of Ometepe completing tasks that imitate daily local Nicaraguan life. It forces you to adapt to the challenges you face as you run 60 miles through a brutal course and the chances are that you will not finish.

The landscape was a patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, forest. Almost every hill had either a ruined fortress or a church on its summit. Villages with stone farmhouses and more churches punctuated the hillsides.

Anyone who has traveled into the Grand Canyon understands the great immensity of what they have entered into. You don’t really go into the canyon, it swallows you whole.

It was 7 a.m., six miles out in the high country above Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. The four of us struggled up Koip Pass, gasping for oxygen at 11,000 feet.

The thunderstorm abruptly ended and I stepped out onto the cobblestone street toward the start line of the Lavaredo Ultra Trail in the historic plaza in the center of Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy below the looming belltower that would soon toll 11 p.m. and our departure up into the mountains above town.

There’s no way we’re running up that, right? Wrong. Only six months before, while sitting in the relative comfort of my living room, I came across an advertisement for the Transylvania 100k, a race beginning and ending at “Dracula’s castle.”

Morocco conjures images of crowded souks, piles of spices, rolls of carpet, elaborate lampshades and incomprehensible bartering – these were the sights of Marrakech, our arrival city. Having survived its hammer-blow to the senses, we escaped to the edge of the Sahara desert. Here we stretched our legs on the first day with a half marathon though sleepy villages.

It all started about 10 years ago while visiting the Grand Canyon National Park with my wife. We took a quick look at the majestic canyon, did the touristy things, bought souvenirs and then drove back to Phoenix. I always carried this sense of guilt inside me, always knew that somehow I had violated the grandeur of that place by not even setting foot in its entrails!

We had been running through the desert of Baja California for 17 hours. Despite being followed by armed police, obsessing about water and losing a couple of runners to injury, it had been a great day so far. All that quickly changed once the sun went down.

On a Sunday morning in early March, an eclectic group of runners make their way into a small, crowded kitchen on top of Mt. LeConte. The LeConte Lodge is closed, but we’re here at the caretaker’s invitation, readying for a day of running in the Great Smoky Mountains. We drink cowboy coffee and hastily down donuts, indulging in what would normally be off-limits pre-race food.

During dinner at the Mammut sales meeting, Dave, the company’s hard goods manager, turned towards me and shouted, “That’s insane! The Grand Teton in under three hours?”