Thoughts While Recovering

I have been going back through my stack of Trail Runner Magazines and Ultrarunning Magazines for several days now. Upon picking up an issue of Trail Runner that dates back to 2009 I began skimming the articles and reading the ones I had forgotten. I got to a particularly interesting article by Garrett Graubins who, I feel, writes in a pleasant and often humorous manor. The article describes two road trips that had been taken recently. One of the road trips was taken by himself, a seasoned trail runner, the other taken by a his friend, a seasoned road ultramarathoner. He compared the two trips in an amusing way. He (the trail runner) stopped several times to go for runs along the trail and took 3 days while his roadie friend took just over 24 hours with 4 stops total and lamented not driving sub-24.

This article struck a note with me because I feel I have strayed to the later in my posts this year. I set out to record my trail runs several years ago not with numbers, but with all the interesting things I saw or things I thought along the way. My early scratchings in my "analog" training journal of 2010 had some notes on wildlife that I had seen, interesting descriptions of the trail, and sometimes a discussion of a new idea I had thought of during the run. I don't think I do a very good job of that anymore. My latest blog postings have been filled with short, descriptions of the trail (not very interesting either), and statistics of how far and how fast I ran. While my records of this year do help me remember the important facts of my runs from this summer, they are not very interesting to anyone but myself.

My goal for this winter was to improve my writing skills. I still hope to do this. If I could write several stories a week filled with interesting ruminations cool descriptions of running cool trails then I could still keep my boring weekly summary with its technical writing. I could have both to look back on and remember and others would be more interested in the stories I have to tell. Believe me, I have plenty of them!