My little baby blog turned 15 years old this month! 15! I cannot believe it. 

This blog has given me so much over the years. It's held me accountable for my fitness goals, which was the reason I started back in April 2006. It's also where I taught myself to code and developed my technical skillset through a lot of trial and error. At one point, it even made me a little bit of money.

Blog design circa 2015.

Perhaps most importantly, it's how I connected with a bunch of other people from all over who were also interested in running and made "Internet friends" that became real life friends that I still have today. 

This corner of the Internet started as a bare bones running training journal using a boring Blogger template. I tried to find a picture of what it used to look like but the WayBack Machine didn't archive my first template. This was the earliest look that I could screeenshot from 2010, with my old original blog name.

My first post was all about my decision to sign up for my first marathon, and every post for those first six months chronicled each run I went on. I wrote in excruciating detail about the summer humidity, about the hills, about tracking my distance. They were often lengthy posts, and there were no pictures. Blogging was definitely about the words back in 2006. 

Over time, my blog morphed. As more people came to blogging, bigger communities were building, real-life friends were developing and I shared a lot more than just running in this space. The early 2010s was definitely when the blogging boom happened. I was writing more than 200 posts in those years, going to meet ups with my "Internet friends," and treating this blog much more like a part-time job with an actual strategy behind it. 

Here's a real throwback from 2011's Healthy Living Summit in Philly.

A few years later, at the same time my life got busier (grad school, more work responsibilities), lots of the blogging community shifted to other platforms like Instagram. With less time on my hands, I found myself with less motivation to write here. There were a few times I thought about just shutting the blog down, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. 

And here we are. 15 years later. I write sporadically now, when I have time, more for myself than for others. In some ways, this blog has come full circle. I started it as a running journal -- something I never really expected anyone else to read. And now it's just a place where I can document fitness goals, great books I've read and our house projects. 

I don't know what the next 15 years will hold for this space. For now this works, and if it starts not working, I'll adjust.