Why yet another new blog?

The Good?

It was a combination of the pandemic, reading more than I have in a long time, all the negativity that is going on around us, looking at life from a possibly shorter perspective, and thinking about what I really enjoy writing about.

The answer was easy – Running and things related primarily to running.

So here I am back at a Time to Run Again which is the same name that my original running blog had back in 2011. Sometimes you just have to stop, look at what you really want, even go backward, in order to move forward.

Yes, there is a lot more to life beyond running, but at the same time, it is what I am passionate about. So instead of forcing myself to go in directions that I really am not as interested in as running or writing/researching about stuff that creates more anxiety in my life doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The other thing you will notice is that I went back to WordPress.com. Blogger is getting a lot better to use, but I had all of my online life tied to Google and that just made me nervous. If I was locked out or lost my Google account somehow, my blog would be one of the first things I would miss. A little diversification of my tech life is not a bad thing, although WordPress.com is a bit more expensive each year.

The Bad?

My One Foot In Reality blog, yeah the one that I have gone back to three times and am now leaving for the fourth time holds a lot of memories, ghosts of past decisions and mistakes that I have made blogging or professionally that sometimes haunt me to this day. I no longer wish to deal with those things and leaving One Foot In Reality, accomplishes that for me. I no longer say never, but the odds of me ever returning to One Foot In Reality are pretty slim.

I also felt that writing a daily living journal was putting too much of “me” and my life out in the public space. The more I thought about it I don’t feel comfortable doing that as much as I was. Much of what we do, my thoughts and ideas are just that, mine and when the fingers get moving and the filters come off, I hit publish sometimes when it might have been better to just have hit the delete key. There will be glimpses into my life beyond running, but they will not be the primary focus of Time to Run Again.

Along with the idea that I was noticing an increased amount of negativity in my posts that concerned me quite a bit when I would go back later and re-read what I had posted. I am usually a positive person and this negativity creeping into my writing was also creeping into other parts of my life – not what I wanted.

What was I thinking?

Thinking about this change is something that has been weighing on my mind for a while and part of the reason that I have been so sporadic in posting on One Foot in Reality lately.

Over the past couple of months, I have deleted so many posts out of frustration or because they had me up on a soapbox spouting off about this or that. When I went back and looked at the posts that I did publish, it was primarily about — gee running.

So I am going back to writing about running as my new blog’s primary focus, it is something I am passionate about and lets me avoid getting sucked back down into the negativity that surrounds us with everything going on in the world. I am not going to bury my head in the sand, but I am not going to let it rule my life either.

Yep, this is a long and wordy explanation post that could have been summed pretty quickly by saying:

I stopped writing at One Foot In Reality because I was getting sucked in by some nasty ghosts haunting it and as a result was crawling around too many of the rabbit holes that are part of today’s world. Which created too much anxiety in my life. It got to the point where I was not enjoying writing on my blog anymore. So I recreated Time to Run Again to refocus my writing on running and am looking forward to seeing where I go from here.

In other words, I have made the choice to be more positive, step back from a lot of the negativity, and enjoy the life that I do have. Which will also mean a little different look for me on Twitter and Facebook going forward as well.

Welcome back to Time To Run Again.