Re-creation

So my initial idea for the first (new) post on this blog was two-faceted 1) to state its purpose: to track my progress toward achieving my goal of dragging my old, fat butt under seventeen minutes for 5k - which, no problem there as I just did it - and 2) to provide some history on my running with emphasis on my post-collegiate efforts. I was going to cull some of this info from my old Geocities site which, until fairly recently, was still up. Given that I had created the site back in 2001 or 2002, it seemed as permanent as anything in a place as transient and ephemeral as the internet. To my chagrin, when I tried going to the site today in preparation for writing this blog post I learned that Geocities is no more. To modify Monty Python's dead parrot skit, it is an ex-website.

This, it goes without saying (although I'm going to anyway), is not the end of the world and doesn't even significantly affect this post other than to have prompted me to provide a lot of explanation for something that no one is going to really care about anyway, namely: the last time I actually broke 17:00 for 5k. If memory serves (and I'm learning more and more as I get older what an decreasingly compliant servant it is), it was May of either 1999 or 2000.

There, all of that for all of that.

It's not like I haven't been running, I just haven't been doing it very fast or with the sort of discipline required for improvement, or even to stave off decline.

Other quasi-significant milestones in my decline:

Last time I broke 18:00: April 25, 2004 - 17:57

Last time I broke 19:00: September, 2007 - 18:43

Last time I broke 20:00: May 31, 2009 - 19:08

I'd like to do this sometime this year, probably this fall. Battery on the laptop dangerously close to running out, so I bid you adieu, anonymous and probably nonexistent reader.