Greetings, friends. Today I’m starting what I intend to become a habit of writing daily and sharing it with you. I’m inspired partly by Kimmie’s 750 words a day journal and Rick’s Good Morning. Hello. How Are You?, the latter of which he crossposts to Facebook, and which the Algorithm has decided I want to read every morning. And it turns out, I sort of do want to read every morning what Rick has been thinking about. Sometimes he’s ruminating about culture or politics, and sometimes he’s talking about what his daughter said to him at breakfast, but Rick is a pretty interesting guy. I often learn things from his journal, and at the very least I get a warm fuzzy feeling from witnessing a friend’s train of thought rumble through the same mountain tunnel at exactly the same time of day every day.
So here we are. I don’t expect, and indeed don’t care whether anyone ever bothers to read this, but I do want to develop a habit of writing, and almost nothing motivates me more reliably than a sense of social obligation. If I have told you that I intend to write 750 words or for 15 minutes daily, whichever comes first, then I’m about 10000% more likely to actually do it.
In like fashion, it’s worth me mentioning here that I messaged Michelle over the weekend to congratulate her on running her first 5K, and she told me that she was training for the Brooklyn Half Marathon in May. Running a half marathon has been on my bucket list for years, and of course seeing an opportunity to hitch that intention to a bit of social accountability, I immediately offered to run it with her, and that led to me signing up for the Brooklyn Half ticket lottery. We shall see if either Michelle or I actually get a bib, but, if not, there are other races out there.
Those of you who have been paying attention to me talking on Facebook about running and social accountability may remember that 10 or 12 months ago, I talked about doing Couch-to-5K, and you may be wondering what happened to that. In fact I did diligently pursue a Couch-to-5K training program for 6 or 7 weeks, and then broke my ankle in a motorcycle accident. It was during the long recovery from that injury that I started speaking again to Besha (who coincidentally had broken her own leg that same month) for the first time in years, and that led ultimately to me packing everything up and moving to Vancouver, Washington, from whence I write this, gazing out over the mighty Columbia River from my window. Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
So here we are. This time I am training using the “Run with Hal” app. I don’t know who Hal is but he has a nice mobile app and he seems to know about running. I am doing training runs of increasing distance every other day until the actual half-marathon training starts in February. Yesterday I ran 1.2 miles, admittedly at a 14 minute pace, but without stopping! So I am well on my way to distance running glory, close on Michelle’s heels, who will undoubtedly smoke me in the actual race in spite of being about a foot shorter than I am.
Rick, I don’t know how you do this. I’ve been writing for like 25 minutes, and I’m only up to 700-ish words. I don’t think I can commit to spending more than 15 minutes a day writing, especially with all of the running I now have to do as well. Ah well. Such is the nature of social accountability.
I’m burying the lede a bit, but my employer announced layoffs today. Neither I nor my teammates were directly affected, but a couple people I’d hired over the past couple years were. I wish them my very best and would be honored to recommend them to future employers. Tomorrow, probably, I’ll have something to say about how my job is changing, depending on whether I have read the tea leaves correctly or not… but al-hamdu’lilah, for now I seem still to have a paying job.
If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Have a wonderful day.