People say that the first post sets the tone of the blog. So before I think too much about it, let me get the first one out of the way.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog about my races, my training, and fitness in general for quite some time. However there was always that excuse… “I don’t have time”.

Recently, a friend of ours came to my wife and said: “You two are lucky to be fit!” I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, and I wasn’t there to ask. Genetics? Sure it plays some role but let me tell you something, leave me for a month in Brazil without training and with my mum cooking and you’ll see the numbers on the scale going up and my fitness level going down!

Lucky? Really? That word was echoing in my brain, probably because the episode happened in the middle of my marathon training. Not a good time to hear someone telling that you’re “lucky”. Even worse, halfway through the training I started coaching a group for the Sydney Morning Herald half marathon with the Can Too Foundation. Because my long runs were already over 20km and the group was just starting, I had to move my long runs to Friday. Not that bad until you need to run 34km and have a work meeting at 9am. And that was the day I took the photo in the post.

Lucky? Really? Yes, I was “lucky” to have an alarm clock to wake me up at 4 am, “lucky” to have healthy food in my fridge, and “lucky” to be avoiding alcohol at parties. I was angry and wanted to write about it. Where is my blog? It didn’t exist, I didn’t have time, but the idea was growing stronger.

I’m glad the idea of a blog didn’t materialize at that time. Would have been for the wrong reason. I never imagined it as a space to rant on about things (even though I kind of just did it, and in the first post ;-)). The final push to have it done came on the last Saturday before the SMH half marathon race, when I came up with this crazy idea of doing twelve marathons in one year to raise money for cancer research (I’ll explain in a future post). No, it is not an original idea, people have done it before, but it is too big to let it happen without writing about it. I needed a blog. If I can fit it in one year, I can fit some extra hours of writing in my week.