Welcome to RunningCommentary. What or who are we?
Not an easy question to answer. Things have changed over the years, and will continue to change.
The site first appeared in 2001, before the word ‘blog’, or even the idea, was widely known. Embarrassing to admit, but at the time, I thought I’d invented the concept of an online diary. I still reckon this is one of the oldest continuous blogs on the entire interweb, and until someone corrects me, I’m laying claim to being the longest continuous, and continuing, blog specifically about running.
“Specifically about running”? I’d better clarify, before wasting any more of your time. There is very little here about the art and science of running. Training theory and biomechanics are not my specialisms. I’m more interested in motivation and aesthetics, but I’m no expert on these either. I guess it’s the people element that fascinates me most.
It’s stating the obvious, but running is a people activity. Even if you plod alone, as I generally do, one’s impulse is to want to talk about the experience. Getting out there on the road, or on the hills, or on the towpath, or the beach, or even (some say) the treadmill, and sharing the stories, teaches you more about your earthmates, and yourself, than you really ever wanted to know. It’s not an activity isolated from the rest of your existence, but ends up being the centre of of it all, keeping you sane and holding things together. When I run, I think crazy stuff; when I don’t run, I think about running, and wonder what crazy stuff I’m missing out on.
A more convincing reason for not writing solely about running here is that the progress of my athletic career has much in common with the topography of the Beachy Head Marathon. Injury, race recovery, apathy, other commitments, and periods of mild self-loathing, regularly intrude to keep me off the road for periods. After lumbering round the Boston Marathon in 2009, persistent calf injury stopped me running.
Now, more than three years later, I’m trying again.
How did it all start?
Back in 2001, I was a novice who’d finally breached the three mile barrier, eight months after first trying. It may seem a modest achievement, but after 25 motionless years, most of them wrapped around a chronic nicotine addiction, it was big news for me.
So what do you do with three hard-won miles? You slip them into a back pocket and set off on an 18 week journey to the 2002 London Marathon. It was intended to be a temporary adventure, and this site nothing more than a motivational aid. But a marathon, I was soon to discover, isn’t an ephemeral experience. For most of us, it’s not something you can compress and file away and forget about. Women talk about a marathon as being akin to childbirth. It’s not just the pain, but the sense that the event represents a watershed, beyond which your life will never be quite the same again.
Extending that metaphor, doing just one race and then going back to your old life seems like abandoning the baby in a public phone box. My curiosity had been released, and that was it. Toothpaste and tubes.
Beyond London, the marathon road continued to Chicago (October 2002), Copenhagen (2004), Hamburg (2005), Zurich (2006), and that charity run in Boston (2009), with the site always tagging along behind.
Since that frozen December morning in 2001, the site has evolved. It started out as a running commentary on my own adventures alone, before the focus shifted to providing encouragement and practical assistance to novice runners, first-time marathoners, and anyone else looking for support or advice. Through this, and the introduction of a forum, the site became a meeting place for others. For many, it’s been a sort of crossroads on their own running journey; a place where they spent a while before moving on. Other people I just can’t bloody shake off, and they’ve turned into good friends of mine.
We have in common a fascination for running and beer — not necessarily in that order. As mentioned earlier, another shared pleasure is talking about running. The more we run, the more we want to write about it. Both activities are reflective, and each encourages the other. When you run, the world becomes a new place. Running reinvents you. It shines a light into dark corners. It’s hard not to talk about these things, and to want to listen to the stories of others. It’s a constant theme of the emails I receive.
I encourage others to write about running — and anything else — by making space available here. As the site matures, it becomes more inclusive. Of course I want people to read what I write, but through this, to think about their own battles — past, present, and to come.
If you want to read my own adventure from the beginning, click here.
Do visit the forums, where you’ll find some truly excellent writing from other runners. If you fancy creating your own training log on the forum, as others have done, drop me a line. As time goes on, I plan to pull some of the material out of the forum and give it a more prominent position on the the site.
I don’t heavily promote the site, preferring instead to grow organically at our own pace through word-of-mouth recommendation. Also, I don’t accept paid advertising, despite having been asked a number of times. This is a refuge from the frantic commercial maelstrom that is the internet today. Just buy the book, when it appears, and I’ll be happy…
Thanks for your continued interest and support, and do please continue to email me with requests, ideas, complaints or comments of any kind.
Get running, get living.
Andy
