A running blog

In May of 2011, I'm planning on running my first-ever marathon, the Big Sur International Marathon.

It's a bit of an obsession with me, but I realize that not all of my Twitter followers and Facebook friends share the obsession. So, I've decided to start yet another blog, focused just on running.

If you want to read the posts, be my guest. If not, they're easy to ignore.

If you want to see my other work, check out my personal blog, or my column on Seed Magazine. I also write a monthly column on 3quarksdaily. And if you can't get enough of my writing about running, check out the Davidson Area Running Team Blog.

I've been a runner since my sophomore year in high school, when I was on the cross country team at Garfield in Seattle. That was over 25 years ago. I was on my college track team, at the University of Chicago, for one year. In both cases, I was one of the worst runners on the team. But I didn't start out the worst -- I was simply the guy who didn't drop out.

After college, I kept running through grad school. When I moved to North Carolina, I kept running, about 3 or 4 miles a day.

Then, in 2006, I decided to try a half-marathon, my longest-ever race. I finished, but I ran a bit slower than I was hoping. My time was 1:51:59, or roughly 8:30 miles. I ran another half in 2007, even slower.

If I was ever going to run a marathon, I wanted to really run it, and to me, somehow, you're not running unless you run 8-minute miles. Last month, after a hard-training fall, I ran Charlotte's Thunder Road Half Marathon once again, beating my 2006 time by more than 9 minutes (here's my recap), and running well under 8-minute miles.

For Big Sur, I'm planning on ramping up my training even more. It's one thing to run 8-minute miles for a half-marathon; it's another thing to continue running that pace for another 13.1 miles. I'll have more on my training in future posts. So long for now...