Blog Resurrection

Sadly it's been 244 days since my last entry here. So what have I been up to all that blogless time? My last post dealt with running the Portland Marathon in October 2010. Since then I've done a fair bit of running. Shortly after my last post I ran the UW Dawg Dash 10K, followed by the Seattle 1/2 Marathon at the end of November (a terrible time to run a race in Seattle), then I kicked up my training though the Winter, in preparation to run another full marathon in March of this year, but before doing the marathon I ran the St Patrick's Day Dash, then it was off to Washington DC for the National Marathon on March 26, followed by the UW Bothell 5K, and my best run to date the Seattle's Best 15K.

So what's the point? I'm certainly not winning any of these races, I'm not even raising money for any of the causes supported by the races (at least not intentionally). All this running is entirely for my own selfish pleasure. But if you back a couple years to 2009, you probably couldn't get me to run more than a couple hundred yards to catch a bus (and in all reality, there will be another bus coming eventually, so why bother).

Originally I would have told you that the point of all this running was to get in shape for my climb up Mount Rainier at the end of July 2010, but as I found out when going up Rainier, running (alone) is an inadequate means of training for mountain climbing. At one point I might have told you that I run because of the health benefits: I went from quarterly visits to the doctor to a much more normal annual doctor visit, I might also try and quote that crazy popular book that is credited with reviving the current running trend (yah, I read it too). Lately one of the reasons I tell myself I do all this running is that it might help to inspire others to start running (I would like to think that it has). However if I'm going to be honest with myself, running has become something of an addiction for me. When I take a day or two off of running, I can feel the withdrawal symptoms kicking in as I see someone running from a car or bus that I might be in. I really want to go run.

So how am I going to feed this addiction? I figure I can just keep pushing myself a little further every year. Maybe next year I'll try an ultra-marathon, the 50K Mount Si Relay & Ultra seems like a good first utlra-marathon to try. Perhaps I'll try gaining membership in Marathon Maniacs. Also, I would also like to do one of the World Marathon Majors, the Chicago Marathon in 2012 might be a good one to do.  Regardless, I'm certain that running is a good thing for me, and I want to stick with it. For this year the only big goal is to run 1000 miles or roughly just less than 20 miles a week. Right now I'm at 462 miles and I would really like to be over 500 miles by the July 1 half way mark, but that's just 38 miles in 2 weeks, shouldn't be a problem.