Hi there. If you found this site you must be either looking for serious running adventures on the Big Island or you heard about the nut that likes to do them. Below you’ll find the articles I’ve put together describing the last set of adventures I’ve completed: running from the Sea to the Summit of all 5 Big Island Volcanoes. My latest challenge is to run/swim/hike the entire Hamakua from Waipio to Pololu in under a day and I’ve been sharing the training and exploring of this route in the articles below. You’ll also find some of my ramblings here; typically focused on how to get faster and stronger with age. And of course I do all the guinea pigging and then share my successes and failures with you. So… Enjoy the site and don’t forget to leave a comment or a question if you have one. I’m happy to respond.
This is basically part 2 of my training and exploring from Waipi’o to Waimanu. For this run though, I needed to get to Waimanu Valley Beach and then swim the 3/4 of a mile out to the next travellable landmass – Laupahoehoe Iki. This section is the start to a spectacular 4-mile coastline of cliffs…
This adventure is a bit of a departure from my latest challenges. I wanted to get into the Honopue Valley from Pololu and though on maps it shows a trail all the way to the back of the Honopue Valley, this is not a trail that you can run very much of. In fact, this…
Running from the Waipi’o Lookout to the Waimanu Valley beach and back is actually a fantastic adventure run on the Big Island. Normally people hike into the valley and camp for a few days and the effort to carry all your supplies in can be considerable. And this forces you to take a slow measured…
The Big Island of Hawaii’s volcanoes tower over us as we go about our days on the island. It felt inevitable that at some point I was going to have to experience running up each one. Below you will find the articles I have written regarding the training and adventures I had to accomplish running each volcano ( Hualalai, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, Kilauea, and Kohala) from the Sea to the Summit in 6 months. I am sure someone else must have run all 5 volcanoes but at the moment I’m the only one who has come forward and documented the journey. And my hopes are others will be inspired and find ways to step up to the challenge and improve upon my style and times. Enjoy the writeups below and please feel free to comment or ask questions. I’m happy to reply.
The Sea to Summit of Kohala was one of the most enjoyable runs I have done on the Big Island. On May 27th, 2019 it took 5:54:19 to cover the 16.2 miles and 5,730 feet of elevation gain needed to reach the summit from Spencer Beach. The run really separates itself from the other volcanoes…
Well, it took a couple of tries but I finally managed to run from a small beach near the bottom of the Chain of Craters Road to the Summit of Mauna Loa. It took quite the effort to complete this adventure covering 54 miles and over 14,000 feet of elevation gain in 19:58:05. And when…
Wow – So this was a hard report to write – at least at first. It’s difficult to analyze your failures. Yet when you pick them apart enough you find the gems that allow for future success. And to effectively find these gems you really have to tear the wound open and brutally expose all…
In a few days, I will be running from the Sea to Summit of Mauna Loa. Entertainingly I expected this adventure to be significantly more difficult than the Sea to Summit of Mauna Kea. I will also be doing this run completely self-supported. In this article, I’ll explain what makes this such a difficult route,…
This run has changed multiple times over the last few weeks as I determined how well I would recover from each previous “Long” Run. Initially, it had been set to be the whole Mauna Loa Trail and back. Basically a 40-mile round trip from 6,700 feet to the 13,678-foot summit of Mauna Loa and back.…
Let me start off by saying that Kīlauea presented quite a few more challenges than it seemed at first glance. First of all, how do you get a legitimate summit when the actual summit is not only off limits and illegal to get to, but also at some point it will likely fall into the…
So yesterday I went on a 12-hour road trip with my Mom to the village of Volcano. It takes around two and a half hours to get there from my house so I had a checklist of questions I needed to have answered before I left. It was a blast just hanging with and chatting…
So yesterday I did a 28 mile run up on Mauna Loa. The idea was to run all miles above 11,000 feet and feel out what it would be like to run most of the actual Mauna Loa Trail. So this way I would reach the summit after over 20 miles on tired legs. I also wanted to test myself with no acclimatizing – so I drove to 11,000 feet and just went for it.
This was an exploratory mission on May 7, 2019, to check out the summit of Mauna Loa and to find the best descent route. In around 8 weeks I’ll attempt to run from the ocean next to the Chain of Craters Road to the summit of Mauna Loa. It’s around 54 miles to the summit…
On the water’s edge, the air is calm and tranquil yet you can hear the wind busting through the palm trees overhead. The full moon lights up the night sky as we step towards the gentle lapping waves offering our friend Bill Melson’s ashes to the sand and sea. Toby reaches into the ocean, filling…
This is one of the harder ways to run up Mauna Kea. Though there is a road the whole way to 1/8 mile from the top, your greatest hurdle besides the distance and elevation will be the wind. The prevailing winds come from Hilo through the saddle and blow right down into Waikoloa (We jokingly refer to the area as Waiko-BLOW-a). So you will face a headwind from 5-35 mph for 41 miles until you reach the Mauna Kea Access Road.
