pathetic

I have one comment so far on my blog, and that owe to the friend of a friend. Before the 4th of July race only 4 people had viewed my profile. To think that, at the beginning, I was reluctant to go online with the marathon, because if I gave up on running the world would find out I am a loser… How naïve. How preposterous. How pathetic. The world doesn’t even know I started running, how would they care about my hypothetical giving up?

I am aware that I took some liberties with the unstated requirement of blogging for entries be published in real time, as events unfold. I plan to bring myself up to date.

In the meantime I decided to research marathon stories. I clicked on “marathon” listed under interests in the site’s profile and I found out there are 40 other people on blogger.com who employed the same formulation. I was somehow disappointed – I expected more. Of course, you don’t have to run and blog at the same time.

80% of those 40 are male. The rest is divided between women and people who didn’t care to specify their gender.

35% are from the US, and 25% from Germany. 20% are from the rest of Europe, mostly Nordic countries. (One was from Luxembourg - I am fairly certain crossing the country from one end to the other takes less than 26 miles). There’s one person in South Korea and one person in South Africa. Four are in Singapore and the Philippines.

The given age varies between 16 and 51 for the males. The women who specified their age are in their twenties and younger.

One person had 91 entries, some people had none. It gets blurry here, because some have more than one blog and then entries are not listed anymore. I found one blog that started out like mine, the chronicle of a journey, but it stopped abruptly at the end of 2004. I hope they are all right. Jean-Luc lists as his interests “marathon, marathon, marathon,” but he doesn’t expand on it. Most comments I found were spam.

(It’s funny, but I checked how many people listed Run, Lola, Run as a favorite movie, and I found exactly the same number: 40 besides me. Hmmm… I wonder if there’s a cap on 40. I have to research this further. )

I concluded these findings are inconclusive and typed in “marathon” into blogger.com’s search engine. I got over 600,000 returns. Too much to do statistics. I typed in “the art of marathon.” Eight finds, most of which pertained to the art of marathon shopping (imagine! an endeavor that requires both endurance and endowment), the art of marathon drinking (the man said he is better at sprinting, I can relate to that), the art of marathon sleeping (I could be a champion, it’s just that I don’t have the time). Only one was really about marathoning. This woman had just run the marathon in 4 hours 11 minutes. I was jealous, not because of the accomplishment itself or the time it took her, but because that entry earned her 7 or 8 comments.

I want to make my blog a success, whatever that means.