February 2020
I started seriously running in 2008 and writing about it a few seconds later. Sadly, many of those words were posted on websites that no longer exist. Happily, I’ve kept archives. In 2020, tasked with learning Drupal for work, I started using some of those archives as filler content for my learning …and it turned out to make a pretty interesting collection of old words and a space for some new ones.
Generally, I post three types of public content here:
First, this is a kind of training log. I run, cross-train, ride, swim, get outside, and more. These appear as basic background noise (2020 onward) in the site, trivial sort of recollections of what I did, how I trained, the weather, the mood, connections to any social media posts I made, and of course some metadata about the activity itself. If one likes reading that kind of thing, the quality and depth varies but it can offer some insight into the day-to-day. It's not front and centre tho, and I'm not highlighting it. It's just there: background noise.
Second, I have dozens of race reports. I've been running races for over a decade and when I started doing them more regularly I started writing about them: the lead up, the day, the recovery. I've dug through my old blog archives, and YouTube channel and compiled these into an interesting collection of articles. Some are trivial recollections, some are in depth training insights for major races. Going forward, I hope to make these a robust collection of amature training insights.
Third, I sometimes just like to write about various running-related topics. These aren't linked to any particular activity or race, and might be anything from a technology review to some introspective navel-gazing on cold-weather training. I've tried to categorize these into: running, cross-training, technology, people, or food. There is some chronology there, but these are mostly evergreen writing that I do that I hope are interesting, useful collections.
As above, I've been running seriously since 2008... but my definition of serious might be different than that of my readers. I live in a large, obscure Canadian city called Edmonton. I work full time. I'm a parent. I keep a small roster of hobbies and responsibilities. And somehow I find time between all those other things to stay in shape through running-based training and setting goals around races to keep myself motivated. As I write this, I'm in my mid-40s and still hoping to bring in a sub-two-hour half marathon: I'm about a minute off, right now. In other words, I'm an average guy, putting in the miles to get it done: not an Olympian, not a record-breaker, not elite. Middle-category, mid-pack, pushing hard, and sometimes hardly-pushing.
In the end this isn’t a blog, so much as a collection. Some of it is chronological. Some of it is topic-based. All of it is about my adventures in sneakers. I'm writing about topics related to casual fitness running in the suburbs of a small Canadian city, this site is a collection of race reports, equipment insights and training reflections from a recreational runner. I hope it's informative, but I intend it to be entertainment. Share and enjoy!