Signing On!

A friend of mine in the running world, Chris Russell, who writes for http://www.coolrunning.com/, has a book to his name (The Mid-Packer's Lament), and is otherwise generally moderately famous in small circles, graciously offered me blog space on his web site, http://www.runrunlive.com/ for some periodic rants and ramblings, and so The Second Lap is born. As for why this came about and how I met Chris, that’s a good story and I’ll save it for later. For now, I open with my greetings to the thousands, or hundreds, or the dozen or so who regularly follow Chris’s blogs. Perhaps I can boost his readership to 14.

I’m a 45-year old guy in my second running career. I’ll explain that in a future entry. But that’s the origin of the name, The Second Lap. I started writing on running after being asked to tell the story of my first marathon way too many times – so I wrote it down. Hey Mikey! They liked it! Thus followed another, and another…and so those post-marathon tomes are now taking a bold new leap into the blogosphere.

I live in Central Massachusetts, and I’m married with a team of two lovely daughters, both with that runner build, which is as much my wife’s fault as mine. In real life I work for a technology company as a sales engineer. Or maybe in real life I run, and that work part is just an illusion. Hard to say. If you’d like the 30-minute condensed version of who I am, or at least what’s in my head, check out Episode 8 of Chris’ podcasts on his web site.

Blogging as a social phenomenon is an interesting topic. Everyone’s got something to say, but can I be so presumptuous as to think you want to spend your time and read it? Of course! Allow me to be presumptuous, just for a moment. [ Moment ] Fine, now that that’s past, I’ve got to entertain you or you won’t bother. I've split this initial entry into two chunks: this introduction and today's real blog, making the sum total a bit lengthy. Future editions should be a little tighter.

Aw, who am I kidding? I'm verbose, that's life. But I hope I can be entertaining for you.