Today my blog is five years old. I feel like a bad parent who has ignored her child. The past year I haven't been blogging very much. It seems that Facebook has been the easier route, but I'm not sure why because I can post to this blog right from my cell phone. Maybe the parent analogy isn't a good one after all. Maybe I'm more like the youngster who gets a fun new toy and then forgets to play with the family pet.
I'd really like to transition back into blogging more often. I just need to take the time to select what I'd like to share and then post it. I am living an interesting life, hectic and chaotic at times, but interesting. Nine months ago I started doing something that I never imagined myself doing. I began to run. My son thought it would be fun to run with family members in the Portland Shamrock 5K last March, so I began to do what I've called run-walking. I run for a few minutes, then walk for a few minutes to rest my legs and catch my breath. My son, my daughter-in-law, my twelve-year-old grandson and I ran the Shamrock together. We finished separately, but we all had a blast. I caught the running bug at the Shamrock and what really amazed me (and probably everybody else who knows me) is that I've kept it up. I've run in the Iris 5K in Keizer, the Homer Davenport 2 Mile Run in Silverton and the Oktoberfest 5K in Mt. Angel this year. My grandson ran two of them with me. I have two more 5K races on my schedule before the end of the year, too.
I've experienced runner's knee and shin splits during the summer, when I tried to increase my speed and run too far too quickly, but I'm working through the healing process and slowing down a bit, and I'm still on the road. I don't know how many more years my fifty-seven-year-old body will permit me to run, but I hope it's going to be for a long time. I'm only run-walking three miles three times a week, but I hope to gradually add more miles to my workouts so that I can eventually run/walk a 10K and then a half-marathon. In those longer races, I will certainly be walking more than running, and in a half-marathon, I will be walking the entire course, but I know that I can do it if I very gradually increase my miles.
It feels good to run and it feels good to blog again.