running: the dawn

Over the weekend there were a couple chance encounters of the blog kind. A couple of my friends overheard Mr. Dawn asking me about my blog and were very offended that I hadn’t yet told them about this little venture. I have to admit that I’m a timid blogger. I haven’t been announcing my site from the rooftops, mass emailing my entire contact book, or even voluntarily giving the address to my husband (I made him ask for it).

I’m not sure why this is. I’m not intentionally hiding. At least I want to believe that I’m not. I guess I just feel silly. I was a math major in college, and I’m worried that I’m going to be rejected here in the world that is dominated by right-brained thinking. I know that I’m not going to be eloquent or poetic, so I don’t want to burden people with my ramblings.

This weekend I also had a conversation with my dad and he asked me what the point of my blog is…and since then I’ve been working on putting that into words, so here it goes:

My blog is first of all a place for me to record this training season for my marathon in June. Each time I’ve trained for this distance, it has been such a different experience with different injuries, triumphs and shortcomings. I want to remember it all. While I still have very clear memories of some of the best moments from my other races, I can’t always remember the path I took to get there.  I want  to learn from, not repeat, mistakes.

Another layer to the onion of purpose that is my blog is developing discipline. Running a marathon (or any race for that matter) takes training and training requires discipline. One thing that I know about myself is that I can’t be accountable to just me. I need other people who are going to ask me how the running is going, or how I’m doing with my training schedule. I need to put my goals out there in black and white so that I then will be motivated to see them through.

The last element that I hope to gain through this process is strengthening my literary abilities. When I want to be a better runner I run. Likewise, if I want to be a better writer I need to write. I need to write and then reflect on my words and write some more.

When I was in college, I was asked to write an article to be published. I was working with my mentor on a research project and we were about half way through the process and we just wanted to start synthesizing the material we had collected so far. Writing that little article was one of the most personally painful experiences I can remember. There’s something about choosing words and putting them down on paper that is a really vulnerable task for me. I remember feeling like every time someone edited my article they were criticizing me personally. By the end I didn’t even feel attached to the paper, I felt like the words belonged to someone else and I didn’t even recognize them anymore.

It’s time for me to move on from that experience and stop feeling intimidated by the writing process. So, here I am. No editors, just me. (Which means the spelling my get interesting at times, it’s the only class I ever got a C in…)