4 Year Blogoversary

Yesterday was my blog's 4 year blogoversary, but I wanted to post something special for Father's Day, so I delayed my celebration until today.

So, first, a little history: In 2005, when I started this blog, Jerry and I had just gotten engaged and we had just bought our condo and we were up to our eyeballs in the initial stages of renovation. At the time, I was still an adjunct professor, so I was teaching at 3 different colleges to string together a decent income, and I also briefly worked a few supplementary jobs to try and fill in my income gaps. And, sometimes I went for short runs.

I'd always toyed with the idea of making running something bigger in my life, and while I'd run a few 5Ks, I didn't have much of an idea about how to make running something I was more committed to.

At the time, I was reading the memoir "Julie and Julia" (soon to be a movie this summer); it's about a woman who decides to cook every recipe in Julia Child's "The Joy of Cooking" and while she's doing this experiment, she blogs about it. I didn't want to cook, but the thought of starting a blog seemed like an appealing way of tracking an experiment. Combine that inspiration with an article that I had read in RW at the time about forming a habit in 21 days, and you have the two ideas that merged into my creation of this space.

And now, here it is 4 years and 1,383 posts later.

In that time, a lot has happened. Certainly, there have been a lot of personal highlights:

• Jerry and I got married.
• We got Scooter.
• I got a full time faculty position at 1 college so I got to ditch all the other side jobs, and I finally started making a decent income.
• We finished remodeling our condo (took us two years!).
• We got pregnant.
• We've taken a lot of fun vacations and have spent a lot of good times with friends and family.

But there was a lot that I accomplished with running too:

• I completed the Disney Marathon.
• Ran 6 half marathons.
• Ran dozens of 5Ks.
• Ran just about every road race in between: 4 miler, 10K, 10 miler, 15K.
• Set and re-set my personal records.
• Ran while pregnant.

However, the past four years haven't been filled with just accomplishments and highlights; I've experienced many failures, lows, mishaps, and embarrassing incidents, personal and running related, as well:

• DNF at A1A HM in 2007.
• DNF at Chicago Marathon in 2007.
• Bad training runs.
• Went without power for 2 weeks after Hurricane Wilma.
• Fell on my face once.
• Pooped myself -- and I wasn't even running!
• Failed to achieve PRs at times when I was confident I should.
• Injury.
• Locked myself out of my car at a race once.
• Car accident, speeding tickets, parking tickets.
• Locked myself out of the house at least half a dozen times (about half those times were times when I had gone out running).
• Drunken bawdiness and other obnoxious behavior.
• Got fired from a job I only worked at for 3 weeks; quit several other supplementary jobs.

In all, it's been an eventful 4 years, and I've had a lot of fun sharing everything with the readers of this blog, many of whom have come and gone over the years, but I am always impressed with how supportive and encouraging the readers continue to be despite the fact that you guys are ever-changing.

I have no idea what the next few years have in store, or what/how blogging may change in that time, but I plan to continue to blog because I have lots more to tell you about. I don't know exactly what that will include, but I'm guessing it will be a mixture of the above accomplishments and highlights, as well as those failures, mishaps, and embarassing incidents. I hope you'll want to stick around and read about it all!