Nowadays, most of us know of March 14 as Pi Day. While it is cute to refer to the day in that way, and my younger daughter and I were a little miffed we picked March 12 to visit Hill Country Chicken for lunch, who had their pie cups on sale for $3.14 only on March 14, it seems the day has literally just become another excuse for companies to rachet up their digital marketing.
One example from my inbox today is JackRabbit offering shipping for $3.14. No thanks, I’m already mentally ignoring all your emails because you send too many of them (usually 2 per day with some sort of ‘deal’), and I’d be kicking myself as I’d rather have bought with your deal from Feb 9 where you had $.99 shipping with the purchase of a pair of socks. If I wait long enough, I’m sure I could catch free shipping – then we’d be talking!
But for me, March 14 is known as ‘430 or Bust’ birthday, and today is the 10th such birthday!
I realize this is extremely anti-climatic, as my blog stats show me I only posted two times in 2017, two times in 2016 and three times in 2015, so this blog is not exactly active any more. Life has a way of moving on and I suppose that is what happened here, but also my running had been terrible and unsatisfying for several years, from approximately 2013 to 2016, and by 2014/15 I definitely had become tired of writing about it.
But, 2017 was a bounceback year for me. I had quit my day job and thus had more time for physical and mental fitness. I was able to resolve terrible problems I was having with my back and neck, get to the gym consistently, and I was also very smart about starting small with my running and building gradually. The highlight for me last year was coming OH SO CLOSE to a 2 hour half marathon at the Queens Half, where I finished 2:00:33. I also trained a lot with my older daughter, and while her speed is much slower than mine, we enjoyed our time running together, and especially enjoyed running and finishing the McCarren 5K together in a very respectable first-race-for-her time of 33:35.
Over the last six months (including this month – March 2018 – because I’m running a marathon on Sunday to get me there), I’ve run at least 60 miles each month. The last time I did that was late 2011 and early 2012, so my running drought has been significant. In fact I’ve had many first-since-2012 moments the last few months.
Looking back to recent history, the one event that recently happened is that I passed 1000 weeks of my Excel running log, which goes back to end of December 1998. I had intended to write a bunch of boring blog posts looking at some of the statistics from the past 1000 weeks of running, and maybe someday I will get to it…
But at the moment, I’d just like to mark this 10 year anniversary of my blog, which I created as a way to chronicle my efforts to beat 4:30 in the marathon (which I did once!), by saying I couldn’t be more excited about my running at the moment. On Sunday I’ll be running the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach, which will be my 20th marathon and 13th state. And while I don’t see myself beating 4:30, my training has been great and I expect to finish under 4:45, and perhaps even closer down to 4:35. And use it as a springboard for beating 4:30 again later this year!
Laughing out loud at my first post, which in true newbie fashion, has hello-world-2 as part of the URL!
Maybe this will be my swan song and you’ll never hear from me again on this blog, or maybe I’ll be motivated to write about 1000 weeks of my running log, or writing about my quest for marathons in all 50 states. I’m sure … you guys couldn’t care less 🙂
