If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I have made some drastic changes to it this week. I’ve deleted almost all of my previous blog posts and media files.

You may be wondering why I did that and what it means for the future of this blog.

I’ve been blogging mostly about running since 2011, and before that – about education since 2007. During that time, I’ve had too many different blogs, and while I have attempted to consolidate them all into one blog over the past few years, doing so caused as many problems as it solved.

With my consolidation efforts, this blog ended up with almost 4,000 posts (that I was able to find and import) and thousands of media files. As a result, I was running into storage issues with my current Premium subscription plan on WordPress.com. If I was to continue publishing here, I would either have to move to their Business plan subscription at $276 a year or delete quite a bit of the blog.

I’m fairly cheap and not blogging as a professional, so I opted for the delete/trash option. I did a back-up before I started, but I don’t ever expect they will ever see the light of day again.

What I found when I attempted to clean up my mess – was that when I imported the old blogs, there are no duplicate file or media filters in WordPress. Which resulted in several copies of posts and media files being added to this site. It quickly became apparent that it was a project that entailed more time than I was willing to invest. The idea of going through and matching up the correct images to the correct post then deleting the remaining duplicate images was simply too daunting.

As it was it took me several days to go through and manually delete the posts, media, categories, and 41 pages of tags. Bulk deletion in WordPress is a pain and time consuming.

I kept a few recent posts from this year, my 50 Years of Running series (I do have to go back and re-upload many of the images at some point) and deleted everything else. While I was deleting things, I still stopped to read many of those old posts. It was like saying goodbye to memories, and old versions of myself. The posts and images I deleted were all part of my journey and my evolution as a writer, runner, and a person.

It was sad, nostalgic, and cathartic.

Letting those posts go was also liberating.

I am not the same writer, runner or person I used to be.

By deleting most of my old blog content, I freed up space, time, and energy for new content on both the website and inside my head. I can work on content that reflects my current goals, challenges, interests, and opinions.

And that’s exciting.

Oh, I’ll still be writing primarily about my running, that won’t change all that much. Though as always, I’ll add in other things as well – I’m sure.

It’s never too late for a fresh start and when I looked closely at the direction, I’m going this was a necessary step. No, it wasn’t the easy way, but like running, looking for easy probably isn’t going to be the correct path.