A Life Between Runs*

Pictured: Me, between runs.

For more than eight years now, I have been a serious runner. And though graduating college has left me without anyone to make me run, and though my running talents really aren’t all that impressive to begin with, and though I keep falling dramatically short of even the meager standards that my talents set for me, and though having a real job gives me a perfectly good excuse to cut my running back, if not stop altogether, and though…

…wait a minute, where was I? Oh, yeah. I’m still running. And though I continue to enjoy it, I sometimes still feel as I did in college, when I would do a workout in the morning, eat breakfast, go to classes, do some homework, take a nap, go to practice again, eat dinner, go to sleep, wake up, and run again. On such days, running defined my life so completely that it seemed to form its very parameters. I had to squeeze in the life I wanted to live during the time I wasn’t running. I was living a life between runs.

Because I continue to live, in some respects, a life between runs, I have chosen it as the name for this new blog. You could say this is a bit misleading, as I’ve started this blog mostly as an outlet for random thoughts—mostly pop cultural in nature—that I can’t or don’t want to publish elsewhere, not directly because of some running-generated existential angst. I would respond to you, oh hypothetical general addressee, by saying that, as long as running is a part of my life, it will spill over, in some way, into everything I do, think, and say*. Take that, “you”!

Which is not to say that this blog will focus entirely on running. In fact, I expect to discuss my running very little here**. This blog will, instead, mostly contain my random thoughts, usually on the various popular culture products I consume (so mostly movies, books, some TV, and maybe a little music). For the real reason I’ve created this blog is that, over the past few months, I’ve found myself desperate to write about things that nobody will pay me to write about, and have gone to somewhat extreme lengths still to write about them anyway (including—gasp—writing my first Facebook note in years). Despite this, I still hesitated, at first, to create a blog. The immensely positive response I received on Facebook to the possibility that I would start one, however, has convinced me to follow through with it.

So here, dear readers, is “A Life Between Runs.” I make no promises as to how frequently I will write here, what I will write about, and, perhaps most important, what my ultimate color scheme and layout will be (please bear me with me as I figure that out). But I hope that you will enjoy the dispatches from my mind at least as much as I enjoy transmitting them. And I thank you all in advance for reading.  

*Making the title of the first post on a blog called "A Life Between Runs" "A Life Between Runs" reminds me of the bands who named both an album and a song after the band's name (e.g., Black Sabbath, with "Black Sabbath" on Black Sabbath, and Bad Company, with "Bad Company" on Bad Company).

**If you want to read what I have to say about running, create a running2win profile (if you don’t have one already; if you’re reading this, then there’s a pretty good chance you do) and look up jbutler4815.

***The phrase “a life between runs” has also been on my mind for years now, and if I didn’t come up with a name for this blog first (and quickly), I probably would have never started it. Names are important to me.