100K? No way!

Today my blog, www.alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com hit 100,000 views. Watching the numbers creep up the last few days, I had some fun, fantasizing what I’d type on the fateful day I hit that yummy hundred grand.

And now my mind is blank. I remember nothing and am having trouble generating even the most basic vocab. But I assure you, those words I imagined? Phenomenal. Best words ever.  Pulitzer Prize-worthy, bigly. But today on the day of days? All I’ve got running through my head are disjointed lyric fragments like this: “4 am we ran the miracle mile, we’re flat broke but hey we do it in style.” That’s from the New Radicals song, “You get what you give,” which has been on my various gym playlists for, like, forever. 

In December I hit 75K and I wrote this post about how I started writing, why I wrote, and I listed my greatest hits: https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2025/12/happy-75k-to-me.html. So far that post has garnered a whopping 70 views. Don’t worry. Not quitting my day job, which by the way is retirement – best job ever. 

Quick summary. I started the blog because I was writing a book and needed to establish a writing practice that would hold me accountable. That was fourteen years ago. Over the years, I wrote a lot, wrote a little. Got some stuff off my chest. Tried writing some stories. Talked a ton about running. Bragged a bit. Whined. So much whining. Whining is my favorite thing, I guess. 

Here’s where my head went today when I saw that 100K. Immediately, sent out some texts to some friends – most don’t read my blog -- so we could all pretend they were interested in my writing and so that they could then congratulate me on reaching this milestone. 

Next, I googled blogs and bots. Of that 100K it’s likely that much more than half of those views are non-human. Found this post on www.smartlab.at -- “When half my blog readers turned out to be bots,” that got me a little confused but also gave me some insight into why bots are invading blogs, and the implications for future tech. 

Then I thought about going to swim at the Y but there was a sign from the heavens: thunder started rumbling in the distance. Texted a friend to ask if the pool was open. That’s when I learned that Y procedure out here in cornfield land is to shut down the pool for one half hour immediately following each rumble. But on the plus side, she said, I could socialize in between laps. 

“Think of all the friends you can make while you’re waiting in the rest room for the storm to stop,” she wrote. 

I pictured: cold floor tiles, wet hair, lots of shivering. So swimming was a big nope. 

Instead, I had second breakfast and caught up on my French and Spanish on Duolingo. I’m so trilingual at this point, three years in, that I can sometimes read the storefront signs at the market downtown. Cerrado means closed, in case you were wondering. 

Como estas? I’m good. Thanks for asking. 

I also know how to say ‘ski’ in French. 

Between hablo-ing and parle-ing, I kept checking in on my blog stats. In the last four hours, it’s gotten an additional 1,374 views. I’ll hit 101,000 by bedtime, I bet. Most of those hits so far are from Singapore and China, which I understand are overrun with bot farms. Yay bots. I'm being sarcastic. 

After Duolingo/ second breakfast/ stats checking, my head started deep diving into the beginning blog post years. Don’t know how I survived those years. Both parents sick, then another family member needed help too. Amid all this, I decided getting yet another master’s degree made perfect sense. Who needs sleep? Then there was that overwhelming layer of stress --  of coming into that final third of my teaching career, that point where you know more about the job than the admins do but they’re Dunning-Krugering the crap out of things and you’re their whipping person. And you can’t leave because of the way the state teacher retirement system is structured so you tough it out any way you can. 

No wonder I ran all those marathons.

Now my head is back in the present which is nearly stress-free in comparison, fingers crossed. I’m grateful I can write when I want. Read when I want. Run when I want. I’ve been doing a lot of the first two and finding all kinds of excuses to avoid the third. It’s been months. 

In 2010, I ran what I thought was my last marathon. Two years later, around the time I started this blog in 2012, I started training for marathons again.  So I’m not saying I’ll never run another marathon. I've been running most of my life, after all. 

This is blogpost #193. Who knew I had that consistency? Not me, that’s for sure. I’ve got plans for #200, so I know I’m going to get at least that far. Certain habits, like striving for more than what you’ve got, die hard. For me, that striving sometimes looks like teaching, or writing, and sometimes it means getting sweaty.

Though I’m not running, it’s not lost on me that I’ve been upping my cardio game in other ways. I’ve been swimming and aqua running up to two hours at a time. Yesterday, I walked 8 miles, just for the heck of it and because it felt good. At night dozing off, I’m still running plenty of miracle miles.  

You never know what’s around that next metaphorical corner. More writing? More miles? I’m just glad that after all these years I’ve still got the dreamer’s disease. Forward is an awesome pace.