Where It All Began?

I was recently at my parent’s house, lamenting all the cool toys that they’ve bought for my children that they never bought for me and generally being an ungrateful son when I came across a box of some of my old school work. One of the items in the box was my old ‘News Book’ where we kept a record of the things in our lives that we deemed newsworthy. I’m not sure what grade or age I was in when I wrote the entries in this book, but clearly it was sometime before they taught us punctuation or appropriate sentence length. You may catch some distinctly British phrases mixed in because I grew up in England and also, you should probably be reading it with an English accent.

It says:

June 6
In the holidays was when my daddy took me out for a 1 mile run and I went to Village day and I tried to win a football lots of times but I never did get one and I went on the merry go round and then I had a go at throwing a ball at the can and I got a key ring with a cat on it and my worst thing was when I got a pain in the neck and I got sun burnt.

Now, this brings up some interesting questions like; what on earth is Village day? Was the pain in my neck from the sunburn or in addition to it? Was this my first ever run or had we done this before? Did we run any intervals during that mile? What was the elevation profile like? How do you stretch one sentence out over 2 pages like that? Because seriously, that would have been a useful skill to have remembered in college. And finally, why the hell was I in school on June 6th? That’s practically the middle of the summer. These are all things I’d like to know. I wish I could go back in time and grab that little boy who wrote that by the collar and yell “be more specific,” while shaking him violently, because I think I’d be the better for it.

There were a number of other entries in the book that were a lot funnier than this one, but I found it interesting that I apparently started running and writing about running a long time ago. Check it, I even got a comment on it.

It’s also kind of neat that even at a young age you can see my writing style starting to develop into the complex style that I still use today on my blog and I still run just like I did in the holidays and I even ran last night on the treadmill and I didn’t want to because of the pain in my knee and then I did and soon I’m going to run a marathon and I’ll probably write about it too and I’m going to be fast and I hope that my knee doesn’t hurt and soon I will learn about punctuation and appropriate sentence length.

Exciting Podcasty Update: The new podcast is up, download it here or search for it on iTunes.

How I Became A Runner

I live right outside of that thriving metropolis of hippies and college students that is Boulder, CO. I love Boulder, it’s great, it smells like patchouli and everyone is so environmentally friendly that the majority of their air pollution probably comes from secondhand pot smoke.

Anyway, I had been telling myself for a number of years that it would be good for me to train for a year and then run the Bolder Boulder, a 10K race that is held annually on Memorial Day, but if there’s one thing you should know about me it’s that I procrastinate like a death-row inmate eating his last meal. In 2005, I signed up and paid for an entry in the Bolder Boulder 2 months prior to the race and without any prior training. Turns out that fear is a pretty good motivator. I began running almost daily (which I don’t recommend) and it wasn’t so bad. I’ve been a runner ever since.