Drop in Posting

If you read this blog with any regularity, you may have noticed a drop in the frequency of my postings. Not that I don't still post every week. I do. Sometimes two or three times. But compared to last year when I posted 291 times, I have fallen off the face of the earth. This year, I might or might not make 100 total posts. Why is that? You may or may not care, but I'm really writing this because I like to write. I you do want to know, however, read on. If not, check out the next post. 

One reason for my drop in throwing ink is the multitude of injuries that overwhelmed my body and mind for the past almost two years. One of the purposes of this blog is it serves as an athletic log and forms a permanent record of what I did in terms of training, performance, and health. Starting in November of 2016, my running fell on hard times. A knee injury sidelined me and the inactivity on that front continues. With the running gone, one large stream of my writing went dry. Although this bothered me (and still does), I filled my mind with swimming and lifting which managed to keep me, for a while, out of the pit.

Besides the running, in late June of 2017 a bad shoulder injury further hampered my training. I swam some short distances off and on with discomfort and then I could not swim at all. When the swimming stopped so did the weight lifting. Two more streams run dry caused the writing river to drop precipitously.
Then other losses began to overwhelm me, and I fell into a downward spiral that saw me come home everyday from work and go to bed, nap, and watch television. I was in the pit and getting out proved to be a difficult endeavor, one I had never done before.

While all this was happening, I didn't feel little like writing so I was writing less at home. Not only that, but these feelings spilled over into my teaching. Not feeling like writing myself, I was assigning fewer in-class writing activities at school. I always write when my students write, except when I am checking the weather. Thus another stream went dry further lowering the river.

Although Randy Beets has been gone for a few years, our rivalry remained strong for several of those cycles around the sun. But the longer he stays gone, and with both of us injured in the past, the grudge, although it still holds, has less sparkle than it did. Consequently, another tributary of the once running writing river has run dry. 

A fourth reason for my lack of literary output is our little cat CC. Everyday when I climb onto the bed to relax and watch some TV, she climbs into my lap and begins to purr. With her comfortable and happy, I am not about to push her aside so I can put a laptop in her place. Ain't happening. She gives me great joy and relaxes me beyond belief. I literally thank God for her everyday. The other cats might or might not hang out with me. CC is going to hang out with me everyday.

And finally, that pit I mentioned earlier was a big factor. Several times I thought I was out only to discover to my chagrin that I had slid back down the muddy slope. When your mind is not right, it is difficult to write. But now I am standing on the Solid Rock. The swimming is coming back. I'm lifting several times a week with Trevor. Even a return to running looks like it might be in the future. But no matter how many times I post in a year, I can't see letting this blog go. I do enjoy writing. It often amazes me when I scroll back through my own blog to see how I had forgotten the sequence of certain events, or that I had experienced pain in a certain area, or just to review some really good training cycles.

And with that final period, I just marked off the first thing I wrote on an index card to get done today. Blog. This list looks like this:

blog
study
swim 
Leflore Steel
cash check
mow
paint
workout
jump dog truck
clean storage room

How far will I get down the list? Who knows. Thank you Jesus for enough life to make a list and tackle it gladly.