That thing by that guy who doesn't like running stickers

The Oatmeal's 0.0 Blerch sticker

Last week "He Who Should Not Be Named" published an opinion piece in the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country. Keep in mind that this media dinosaur is viewed daily by 400,000 fewer eyeballs (or 200,000 people without eyepatches) than reside in the entire state of Nevada. HWSNBN framed his contempt toward car decals, running stores and actual runners with the all-too-common meme that society is decaying into a morass of self-entitled narcissists. Many of the gripes are not so different from the (probably satirical) 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook from Wait But Why. Certainly there are too may pictures tweeted detailing Thursday's lunch, but humans have always sought to connect with others who have common interests. Runners' cars are no different from those vehicles with a '3', 'Click and Clack for President' or 'I ♥  My Dachshund' decals on the bumper.

Not too surprisingly, the running world and blogosphere exploded with well-though-out and clever rebuttals including from the likes of Runners World. My personal favorite is Matthew Inman's 0.0 Blerch. I have reserved a spot on my bumper for when the Oatmeal inevitably offers this sticker for sale. The running world doesn't need another blog offering a witty dismantling of HWSNBN's drivel. What might be worth considering, however, is the amount of attention we direct toward these kinds of stories. As Mark Remy from Runner's World points out, 15.5 million people finished races in the United States last year. That's over 6 times the daily circulation of HWSNBN's website/newspaper. That's thousands, if not millions, of click-throughs from people who otherwise wouldn't bother reading an opinion piece from HWSNBN.

Increasingly social media is driving web traffic using enticing (and often misleading) headlines, provocative images and inflammatory opinion pieces. I don't think HWSNBN's piece was designed to corner the market on enraged runners (at least not in the same way that the Huffington Post uses youtube dog videos to specifically target me and make sure I visit their site every day), but the outcome is the same. Click-through data doesn't track content quality, just web traffic. I intentionally did not provide a link to the original piece. I did not, and will not mention the author or newspaper by name. Neither deserve the traffic, advertisement or publicity they received from this story. I liken this to my policy about a group that likes to picket funerals as a means to get news organizations to publicly disseminate their nonsense. If we stop paying attention, a lot of the attention seekers will disappear.

Read the hard news and stay informed, but beyond that I propose a simple policy when it comes to internet media. This policy could be applied to running or broadly. Unless it's informative or makes you happy, don't click on the link.

Welcome to the Running for Racers blog!

Since I've been running for 20 years, this first post detailing my entire career mile-by-mile is going to be quite a doozy. On second thought, the Chiefs/Broncos games kicks off shortly and I do have to work in the morning, so that's probably not the best plan. I'd probably lose steam before I started documenting all the excitement from 1998 anyway. In lieu of a complete history, I'll kick this blog off with an abbreviated background, some recent history and my plans for the 2014 running season.

Although I've run recreationally since college, I had only ran 3 5Ks and one sprint triathlon through 2009. In 2010 that changed significantly for reasons that will be the subject of a future post. In 2011, after a decade or so of cajoling from my girlfriend/fiancé/wife, I registered for and ran my first marathon in Hartford. The longest distance I'd raced before Hartford was a 10K, but that first marathon started an exciting (occasionally expensive and painful) journey. 

My philosophy on running races is to use them as a springboard to visit interesting and/or favorite places. Having lived in Berkeley between 2003-2005, the San Francisco Marathon has been on my radar for a while. Finally my wife and I decided 2014 would be a good time to visit the Bay Area again, and running the marathon would be as good an excuse as any to make the journey. On a bit of a whim, I submitted an application to the San Francisco Marathon Ambassadors after registering for the race and receiving an email notification about the program. I mostly forgot about applying and assumed my services were not needed until a couple weeks ago when I received the invitation to join the team. So here I am. For good or ill. Which, has yet to be determined.

I'm still in the process of learning about what SFMAs do, but I thought a blog would be a good way to start contributing. Along the way, I want to include some stories about my experiences running - why I do it, personal philosophy, interesting races I've run, training "tips" and whatever else seems relevant. Maybe this will be interesting and useful to other people. Or maybe not. We'll have to see.

2013 has been my busiest racing year so far, and I can feel it in my legs. I have completed 26 races already and have 3 more on the calendar. This schedule included 3 marathons and my first half ironman. Despite occasionally planning to the contrary, I always end up racing hard whenever I toe the starting line of a race. Since I always fail miserably at casual race participation, I'm planning to ratchet back on racing in 2014 (sort of). In addition to the San Francisco Marathon in July, I'll be looking to complete the LA/SF Challenge by running the LA Marathon in March. I've already registered for the Pumpkinman Half Ironman in September. The Willi-Whammer Half Marathon (April) and Soapstaone 24K Trail Race (May) are also in the mix. If my legs are still attached to my torso in the fall, I want to make my trail marathon debut in October's Nipmuck Trail Marathon. Pepper in a few local shorter races and I'll almost certainly fail in my goal to race less.

And away we go.....