1,000th Post

Who would a thunk it? When I started this blog in July of 2012, I had no idea that I would enjoy it this much or do it this long. I did not even know blogs existed until 2004, but once I discovered them, I became an avid reader, and a  diligent searcher in quest for the perfect cyberspace serial. I found it a few times only to be disappointed after becoming enthralled with my discovery. Usually the writer quit, just stopped posting with no warning, no explanation, no apology. Or even more frequently, he or she slowed her production to a snail's pace thus frustrating my efforts to enjoy the literary output of a mind I found fascinating.

Slowly I have changed to the point where now I find writing more fun than reading, although I do still read. For bloggers in general, I think the opposite must be true. Do your own research. Look at their archives. I have noticed a pattern, even among the long-lived ones. The pattern is that the blogger's production peaks in his or her second or third full year of the writing adventure and then declines until an eventual halt. This is true at least with the genre of the bloggers I read, people who write about their athletic exploits and adventures. Not so with my little slice of cyber space, however. A quick glance at my archive reveals something different. Look below at the numbers recording my posts.

2012 - 74 (began in July)
2013 - 107 (first full year)
2014 - 125
2015 - 190
2016 - 216
2017 - 288 (as of this posting)

It is not that I am attempting to see how much I can write and how often I can post. It is that I enjoy composing words now more than ever so I write more frequently. Also factored into that is the fact that on my job I teach more English Composition courses than in the past. Often I have my students write in class. While they write, I write. I try to preach what I practice. Sometimes I open up a page and simply start pecking and a strange thing will often happen. I wind up writing something I even like myself, a Poot story, a plan, a recounting of a day in my life. Writing has become fun to me in addition to being therapeutic, cathartic.

I have already written about what I look for in blogs. I look for people who write often, write well, and are interesting. Of course, what I find interesting has changed over the past few years. I once had saved the addresses of about thirty female triathletes. Female because they were the ones writing about that topic. Triathletes because that was what I was interested in at the time. But now, not so much. It is not triathlon that piques my interest so much now as it is marathon swimming. Sadly, I find few people who write often on this latter sweet subject. 

Currently, my favorite blog is Jill Outside. You can find this one on my Blog List in the right hand margin of my blog page. If you read EndangeredSwimmer from a cell phone, you may have never seen my blog list unless you scroll to the bottom of the page. It will look like this.

See "View web version" at the bottom? Click that. Then the page will change and look this this.

You will have to expand the page to read anything on your phone. It is much easier on a computer, however. See the "Blog List" under the picture of Team Centerville and me in our safety orange T-shirts? These are the blogs I read regularly, or at least I used to.

One of these, Gord's Swim Log, was my favorite for a couple of years. Then he, still a fairly young man, retired from marathon swimming on May 24, 2016. Gord swam a lot, a whole lot. He did MIMS, the Catalina Channel, and the English Channel. He turned out huge yardage in the pool five or six days a week Not only that, but he was an avid swimmer of and evangelist for the Great Salt Lake swimming it all four season of the year. Furthermore, he posted often, and I read his writing with relish. Then he announced his retirement and stated that he was dedicating himself to ping pong. What?!?!? I thought that had to be a joke, but if it was, he hasn't given us the punch line in over two years. Who woulda thunk it?

So now my favorite is Jill Outside. Why? She writes well, writes often, and is interesting (see my post of this title from November 6, 2014). Her writing is the best I have encountered in the blogging world, of professional quality. In fact, she has published several books. Take a look at this little snippet from a recent post where she is describing taking a break on a bike ride at a giant, old tree.

This quiet grove is one of our favorite spots in the region. There's a reverence surrounding Old Tree, that unspoken wisdom of the ages extending beyond our meager lifetimes. I love touching the gnarled bark of Old Tree and imagining the centuries it has witnessed, the storms and fires and floods it has endured, and the unlikely way it survived the aggression with which humans reshaped this land. Sometimes I trick myself into the superstition that I can stand beneath this 300-foot-tall giant and absorb some of its power of rejuvenation — a kind of healing wish. Always I see in Old Tree some hope for the future, that even as everything changes, beauty endures. 
                              From Jill Outside, "Here's to my yesterday," December 11, 2017.

Not only does she write well, but the pictures she posts in her texts are also of a high quality and include mountain trail and vistas never seen by a Mississippi Delta boy. And of course, she is interesting. She writes about her athletic adventures, about cycling in Alaska and in the mountains of Colorado. She has that spirit of adventure and the innate desire to push herself, to test her endurance over and over. But even her outstanding blog is going through that decline in output I wrote about above. Once, she posted over 300 times in one year. As of this writing, she has posted 65 times in 2017.  What will 2018 bring from Jill Outside? My hope is that she doesn't stop writing altogether.

Not only have I written about what I look for in blogs, but I have also written about how this blog has changed over the years. First it was strictly an athletic journal. Slowly, I began to write a piece of fiction from time to time, then some poetry. Later I added essays and then the haiku. Unfortunately, the original aim of the blog, the athletic stuff focusing on open water swimming, has diminished in large part because of my health, my injuries which are preventing me from doing a lot of training. Sigh. One day, I hope, pray, and believe, it will all come back.

In the meantime, I keep amazing myself that I have anything to write at all. I don't have a notebook with long lists of subjects. I don't even have a mental garden of topics growing in my head that I want to tackle one day. But somehow, I continue to stumble over something to scribble. How long will it last? I have no clue, but I try to teach my students that life is much more interesting if you are a writer because your senses are more alive, your vision more acute, your brain more active. You are always looking for the next story, the next essay, the next character. And you are surprised and happily so when you find it or him or her.