More Writing in 2011

For the past few years I've taken a step back in the beginning of the new year to kind of "clean house" around this blog. Mostly, I work on the design and layout but I also stop and think about the content of the site. I've gone in a lot of different directions in the past and I'm particularly excited about what I'm thinking for 2011.

When I first started this blog as an injury-plagued 21-year-old college student and runner about to undergo surgery I was focused on "logging". I logged miles and workouts and tucked in little observations and notes about the day. While this works for some people, I found it monotonous and had trouble keeping up the consistency.

Eventually, I found other ways to log my training (Dailymile) and, aside from monthly training updates, I moved on to "sharing". I posted media: movies, music, pictures, and news articles until I created something like a (very) poor mans cross between Bikesnob, PezCycling and Pitchfork. It was fun and worked on some levels but in the end it was too scatterbrained and not a good fit for Blogger's interface. 

Once this ran it's course I started doing a lot of "reporting". I had always written race/training reports as a central part of this blog's content but this really took off in 2010 when I had 17 races and 6 months of training to write about. I had a lot of fun writing these since I had lot of good results and stories to share. But, by the end they were mostly page-long variations on "I sat in the pack, weaker people got dropped, I moved up on the last lap, I sprinted hard, got a top 10, I'm happy". While this the part of my blog I've been most consistently happy with I think in 2011 I can condense and continue to improve my race reports with more pictures and less filler.

But, that brings me to my goal for 2011 in this blog: more "writing". I want to start writing more about my ideas, goals, thoughts and experiences as they manifest themselves in sports. I don't want to go all "LiveJournal" on you guys and get all weepy and weird but I do want to start putting more of my thoughts on here beyond just "Today's race was, like, really hard".

Part of doing this is condensing. When I have an idea I can go to town and write for pages. That's great for journaling or drafting but not for a blog post. This year, when I have an idea, I want to express it as simply as possible till I run out of steam, attach a picture, and then share it on here.

Like this.