About

  1. Home
  2. About

About

Appalachian Trail

I thru-hiked the 2,175 mile Appalachian Trail (AT) southbound, Maine to Georgia, after graduated with an engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1998 . Certainly a defining experience, the AT instilled in me the value of persistence, fitness, and the simple serenity of nature. Ironically, I have done little backpacking since.

At the start and the finish of the Appalachian Trail
At the start and the finish of the Appalachian Trail. On Springer Mountain, in my left hand is a piece of granite that I carried from Mount Katahdin.

Ultrarunning

Running ultras, footraces longer than the traditional 26.2-mile marathon, has been a consuming pursuit since finishing the AT. There are probably two reasons for this: (1) running an ultra is a lot like a compressed thru-hike, wherein the spectrum of human emotions -- from blissful elation to painful misery -- can be experienced in one "run"; and (2) I was in great shape and I didn't want to lose it.

Running ultras is not healthy – but the training is.

— David Horton

In the "real world," ultra running really is ap

Running is such a simple, efficient way to see the world, and I have raced across the US and in Europe. I have a page dedicated to my favorite ultras.

Graduate School

Hiking the AT did not bring the "life's purpose" clarity that I thought it might, so I returned to Blacksburg and enjoyed small-college-town life in the mountains, nabbing a master's degree in the process.

But 9/11 certainly did. As with anyone who lived through that gut-punch of an event

and ended up at Northwestern University. Frankly, I knew little about NU, but the Materials Science and Engineering Department is perennially ranked among the top materials science programs in the country. And I didn't get into Stanford.

I knew I

And, ironically,

I went to Graduate School .

It was a good experience, Chicago is a great city

Settling down

After graduating with my doctorate in 2006, I returned to the Washington, DC, area and started a postdoc at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Parenthood

We put off having a kid almost as long as we could.

Colophon

The site is based on Kirby, a text-based CMS, and is hosted on Bluehost. Everything is hand-coded in Sublime Text. Photos are managed through Adobe Lightroom Classic and other graphic work is done in Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for pixel and vector graphics, respectively. Most data are plotted in DataGraph.