At some point in life, we all figure out what is important and what isn’t. It’s just taken me longer than most.

I’ve been blogging since 2007 and I have written a lot of words over the years since that October day. It has been a big part of my life since then. Blogging still is important to me, but I need to keep doing it for the correct “for me” reasons. 

Finding reasons to write in 2022 has been elusive. 

Especially, since I am no longer blogging for the money, prestige, or any of the myriad other reasons that I used to blog.

What Happened?

During 2022 I was initially injured with a series of hamstring issues, then a torn meniscus finished my running for the year in early May. As a result of my limited running and the frustrations I was enduring this year, I searched for other things to write about beyond running, but nothing worked for me.

I recently had surgery to correct my left knee, but the forced layoff gave me time to think about a lot of things, but mostly about what I think is important in life. During November, I realized just how much I missed running and writing about it. Now that I am past surgery and hopefully on the road to a full recovery, I am confident that I will restart my running journey at some point soon. 

Actually, the rehab process is part of running, so writing about it is a part of my running journey and I have noticed that I have already started to want to blog again. So it also seemed like the correct time to figure out where to go with my writing.

Even before the knee surgery, I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my blog, and last night I came to the conclusion that I think will work best for me. Moving back to my name URL (here), which I had put into hibernation mode, and consolidating as many old blog posts as I could find into it was what best fit my needs. 

I slept on it overnight, hadn’t changed my mind, and this morning I started making the changes. 

Which is a huge change from my usual suddenly having an idea, doing it, then thinking about the consequences of what I’m doing.

What will I be writing about?

Primarily running as an old guy, what changes I am going through, along with what works and doesn’t for me – nothing really that new, but a little more focused on how someone else can use the information. Not as much of a daily RunLog, but something others don’t have to read between the lines to get the point I am attempting to make. 

Then I know that I will write my thoughts about whatever else comes into my mind. I’m not limiting the blog to only running, but it will be my primary focus going forward.

It’s A Process

Most of the day has been spent working to restore this blog and get functional again. During that process, I decided to return to blogging under “A Veteran Runnah”. It was my favorite blog name, which best describes who I am and what I will write about for the most part. Otherwise, I am happy with the progress I have made in such a short time.

I searched through old file backups, that I had squirreled away on both my laptop, external hard drive, Google Drive, OneDrive, and in my archive disks. Then I worked on exporting posts from multiple blog sites and importing as many files as possible. So far I have found and imported 3,782 posts along with 85 drafts and uploaded them. 

Not all the imports have or will work perfectly, and errors will pop up. As far as I can tell I have lost several hundred posts from blogs that simply disappeared over the years, (there are a couple more storage areas I need to check – I am usually pretty good about backing files up). However, I now have most of my old blog posts in one place and will work on issues as they arise.

Now that the exports and imports portions of the project are mostly done, I have moved on to canceling site renewals, deleting the old blog sites (six so far), and deleting duplicate files off my computer. Along with cleaning up the Categories and Tags to get rid of a bunch of extraneous ones that I no longer want to use. Tomorrow I plan to make an archive copy of my progress here and then delete all the other archives that I have uploaded to A Veteran Runnah. There is still a lot of work yet to do, but not everything needs to be done in a single day.

The Reality is

It has been a busy day, but you know something. I feel that I’m doing the correct thing and have a good idea of where I am heading with my blogging this time. 

This time my change isn’t about blogging to promote myself, a brand, or some product. Instead and more importantly, I’ll be writing for my own enjoyment. Along with sharing things I have learned and will learn along the way to whatever comes next. 

In other words, I get to blog because I can, not because I have to, which is an awful lot like the attitude I am taking towards my running when I get back to the trial of miles.

Now, let’s see what comes next and have some fun with it. I know that there will be running at some point in the near future and who knows what other adventures are awaiting a veteran runnah.