Alrighty. I’ve had some presence on the internet since I made my first Geocities page probably around 10 years ago. This was even before we had a computer - I used to make my dad take me to his office on weekends. At first it was no more than some links here and there to comic book sites and whatnot. Eventually I started posting some of the calculator games I’d programmed and building an encyclopedia of my favorite super-hero, the Flash (which has now been absorbed into one of my favorite internet time-wasters, the DC Database). And then, after I went to college, I took the plunge and started a weblog like everyone and their brother.

At first it was just hosted on my university account. For a while I’d been considering purchasing the friedcheese.org domain name, and when I saw register.com having a $1 sale, I snatched it up. I then started messing around with running Apache and MySQL off my computer, and hosted the site from there. Eventually, I splurged for an actual webhost, and the site’s been there ever since.

As far as running, I’ve been doing it for a long time. I was on my middle school and high school cross country and track teams (although my involvement in music kept me from doing them the last couple years), and have run off and on ever since. I’ve done a fair number of 5Ks, but no longer distances in an organized race.

In my 10th grade English class, Mrs. Meyer (I think that was her name…) made everyone write down a list of 100(?) things we wanted to accomplish in our lifetimes. A good portion of them were things I just kind of threw down on the page to get the assignment finished, but there were a few I honestly and truly wanted to see through. I wish I still had the list, but sadly I don’t. I still remember the important ones. Some I already missed my chance on, like becoming an Eagle Scout. Some I’ve already accomplished, like growing a beard and learning to play guitar and piano. But there were two that really stuck with me. One was to earn a Ph.D. I’m en route to that now, having just finished my first year of grad school. The other was to run a marathon.

So, maybe about a year and a half ago, I figured, hey, I’m in my mid 20s, the prime of my life. Let’s do that marathon thing. I bought Hal Higdon’s book, started training, and signed up for the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati. However, at the time, I was working as a manager for a garden center at a local retail store. Lots of evenings, weekends, long hours, and loading 40 lb bags of manure into the backs of people’s trucks. Going home after that and doing a 12 mile long run just wasn’t working out. I put my dream on hold.

So here we are now. With grad school, it’s a lot easier to fit a training program into my schedule. Especially this summer, since I’m only teaching one course and not taking any. So I’m getting geared up for the Spokane Marathon on October 14. Although I’ve been running for most of the spring, my 18-week training program official begins next Monday, so that’s when I’ll start to catalog miles and whatnot.

As for the site, there’s quite a few things I’d like to implement. One will certainly be a little counter of how many miles I’ve run with a breakdown for the week and so forth. Another is a comments feature so folks can tell me how badly I’m boring them or whatever. I’d also like to either have a gallery of this site’s former designs, and maybe even implement them as skins. And there’s a bunch of behind the scenes stuff I’d like to do, to make it easier for me to edit entries, etc. Everything in this site was coded in PHP and MySQL by yours truly. No Blogger or Blogspot or Livejournal or what have you. It’s my sick, twisted idea of fun I guess.

And that’s part of our world tonight.