Welcome

Thank you for joining me on my quest to read 50 books and run 500 miles over the next year. I am sure to some this may not seem like a difficult task, but for me, this will be a great challenge. First of all, I am not a fast reader. In fact, I am probably a slower reader than the average person. What makes me a slow reader? I am incedibily anal about reading every single word in a book and I have a hard time focusing all of my thoughts on one task. That combination causes me to reread many sentences, paragraphs, even pages. It also prevents me from skipping over boring descriptions that do not add to the storyline. That aside, I have also not read many books throughout my life. In high school and college, I was a cliff notes kind of guy. I probably have more copies of cliff notes that I have read somewhere in my parents basement than actual books that I was supposed to read.

On to the running part of the blog. 500 miles in 1 year comes out to be 9.62 miles per week or 1.37 miles per day. That does not seem to be an incredible task, but I have never been much of a runner so this will be a big task for me. Growing up, I played a lot of sports. Everything under the sun, and somethings under synthetic lighting. Soccer, baseball, tennis, baseketball, bowling, football, ping-pong, etc. I was very active. Of all the sports, soccer bacame my passion. As many soccer players will say, running was always my enemy. I only ran when I had to and never anymore. It's incredible that I could go out and play two 90-minute soccer games in a single day, probably running between 10-15 miles during the course of those games and be fine. But, ask me to go run 3 miles around a track and I would struggle. I was never able to get into the mindset of running for the sake of running and not running because that's where the ball was. It's a different perspective that I am just now starting to grasp.

The third challenge of this blog (yes there is a 3rd challenge) is actually posting the blog entries on a daily basis. There are a million blogs on the net right now that are updated multiple times a day, so this would not seem like a challenge, but I have also never been much of a writer. I have never kept a journal (except for a brief semester in college when I was required to for a grade) and I have never written a review on Amazon or Google or any other peer reviewed sites. I have never even posted comments on other blogs or websites. So, writing about books that I have read and about my running habits will not be easy.

So, why would a guy who never really liked to read books, never really liked to run, and never really liked to write start a blog with an ambitious goal of reading and running? As I write this blog, I hope to figure out the answer to that question and many more.