blog-worthy?

I have had blog envy for years seeing the stylish blogs of the seemingly avant-guard who wax poetic about their exciting lives full of intrigue and only the finest pop culture references. In the past I made a feeble attempt at maintaining a LiveJournal page, but after years of dealing with hateful stalkers who could not or would not be thwarted by the LiveJournal staff, I resigned to a Myspace page. This was pretty much a failure as it was 2 years before the account could be logged into successfully even a small percentage of the time (they eventually deigned to fix the bug it seems), and when I was finally able to access it routinely I found the interface to be unintuitive to my biochemist pea-brain.

Recently I have successfully set up a Facebook account with shockingly little struggle (with the exception of the Nike plus widgets of which one will waste your time in failed trouble shooting, the other appears to work to some extent...). While Facebook is a great improvement over my past experiences, it appears to be geared more toward networking than blogging so here I am, starting yet another page.

Probably the most blog-worthy thing going on in my life at the moment is the Nike plus challenge I created. I have recently been running more because I find it a great way to clear my mind while getting back in shape. Using the Nike plus attachment for my nano with the shoe sensor, I have been tracking my mileage from my runs on the Nikeplus website. I thought I would play around with creating a challenge on the site, which anyone in the world can join.

I have always been one to go to extremes, enjoying the subsequent permanent change in perspective (eg. riding 200 miles on my road bike in one day in the Seattle to Portland ride, which made riding 90 miles for a rootbeer float at Custer's Last Rootbeer Stand in the middle of nowhere Montana seem like no big deal). For several years I have also been fascinated by the Tendai Marathon Monks in Japan. I decided that if I was going to set up a challenge it should be as worthy of the Marathon Monks' standards as a person with a day job can possibly achieve. The result is the "26200 mile Marathon Monk Run." The goal is for each person to run 26,200 miles by December 31, 2014.