Blog Envy

A few months back I met this guy Anthony in a Starbucks.  He quickly identified me as a fellow runner (the book, The Long Run, in front of me gave it away).  We struck up a conversation, I shared with him a link to my blog, and we wished each other well.

                Months later, Anthony’s name has been popping up all over the place, and in a weird twist of fate it so happens that we belong to the same running club.  Small world!  As it turns out, Anthony is like my male doppelganger.  He lives a couple towns away, we run for the same club, we run most of the same races, (although he is much faster than me) and he too has a running blog!  His blog is geared towards training for his upcoming Boston Marathon and fundraising efforts for the Alzheimer’s Foundation.  Naturally I had to check out Anthony's blog and see how it compared to mine.

                Let’s just say Anthony doesn’t take distant pictures of fuzzy llamas and post them on his blog.  His blog is polished, organized, entertaining, and the pictures are just outstanding.  This blog really puts mine to shame and made me realize I’m going to need to hire a photographer to follow me and take pictures on my behalf.  Perhaps I’ll just start running with Anthony J. 

                This morning I confided in my pal Scott about my newfound insecurities about my blog.  Scott has his own blog.  Scotty Tris is a blog about his personal journey into the world of triathlons.  I love reading his progress because he is even more neurotic than me, and I feel a little more normal after I’ve read all about his experiments with cadence, pace, calories, meters, and trainers.  Thank God I don’t do triathlons; I can’t imagine having to track performance components of not one but three sports!  Scott also has a food component to his blog, Scott Eats.  He’s quite the foodie, and posts new recipes and pictures of his creations.  So when I mentioned to Scott about Anthony’s blog (which included both running information and pictures of soup), naturally he was intrigued.  And by intrigued I mean slightly threatened.

                Scott and I browsed Anthony’s blog, marveling at the beauty of the pictures and commenting on Anthony’s training success and quick finishing times of his recent half marathons.  We were both envious and I do believe I sensed a little tone of jealousy is Scott’s voice.  Scott quickly announced that his next goal was to “out-do” Anthony’s soup pictures, which I found hysterical that he’s more jealous of the soup than the running.  In any case, reviewing Anthony’s blog made Scott and I reevaluate ours, and will no doubt cause us to step up our game.  Scott’s approach is to find a new soup recipe, and mine is to hire a photographer.  None of this, of course, will help us with our running so we may be a bit misguided with our goals, but one can’t control where the competitive juices strike. 

                So, now that I’ve shamelessly plugged these blogs, feel free to make fun of Scott’s neuroses, check out his recipes, and of course donate gobs of money to Anthony’s Alzheimer’s cause.

Moving On…

                The Boston Tune Up 15k is this weekend!  And right on cue we have another snowstorm due to arrive Friday just to make things interesting.  I went for my last run today, and will be taking Thursday and Friday off to be well rested.  (And this time, my “rest day” will not include furniture moving or any other form of heavy lifting, unlike the day before New Bedford).  Todd and I ran at lunch and he was unusually slow due to a head cold but we still managed a nice 4.5 mile run on a beautiful 50 degree day.  We speculated about what my time would be for the race, which is hard to gauge because of the unusual distance and number of hills.  My only goals are to beat last year’s time of 1:27, not finish in the bottom 10, and not puke during or immediately following the race.  (If I do, I will not have my faux-photographer capture that moment).  J

Special thanks goes to Scott for teaching me the art of including links to my blog!  Sorry I used it as a means to make fun of you J (No I’m not).