Who is Raven J. Blackbird?

Most likely, if you're reading this, we already know each other IRL, because the only places I've put links to this site are on a couple of my social media profiles, all of which I'm largely abandoning for the next year while I focus on training. That said, Google works in mysterious ways, and you might have stumbled upon this site via some other path, so this page is largely for the rest of you.

As of this writing (updated late 2018), I am 43 years old, 5'11" and 230lbs. I am not an endurance runner by any stretch of the imagination; when I go to the gym, I prefer to pick up heavy objects and then put them down again, even though my training in physics tells me that no work has actually been done. I live in the San Francisco area with my two cats, both of whom will make guest appearances on this blog at some point, and I work in tech at a company that you've probably heard of and whose product you might even use (no, not Google or Facebook). I expect that training for this event will consume most of my life outside of work over the next year, but in those moments when I'm not working, training, or sleeping (or thinking about one of the above), there will probably be either some skiing or some psytrance involved (or both).

If you're really bored, you can try to find me on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram, although if you're here because you're interested in following along with this crazy adventure, none of those links are going to be of much help to you, because I don't post much on Twitter, almost all of my FB posts are friends-only (and I never use it anyway), and my IG feed has no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever.

Want to talk to me about something? My email address is easy enough to find with only a modicum of Google-fu.