Blogging - How much to say?

Thank you for reading, or occasionally reading, these posts. Blogging can be a tricky thing. How much do you say? What do you leave out? What is the purpose of the blog or the post? Who is the audience? Is what you are sharing helpful or at least entertaining?

I think about these things each time I write a post (believe it or not!) Yes, sometimes I decide to ignore those questions and post something for myself simply because I want a written record of something. My race reports, for example, are often very long and give too much detail for the average reader. However, I want to be able to look back on those details before I do that distance or that specific race again. I also just want to be able to look back some day and know not just my finishing time but also what the whole experience was like.

This blog has evolved some over time. It originally was a blog of my workouts and races and experiences with training and racing. It is still that but I no longer list the workouts because I think that's probably a bit tedious for an outsider to read. Although I know some people liked to follow my workouts each week because it gave them an idea of what they could do or what was possible.

With an audience of athletes I coach (or coached) as well as fellow athletes/friends, I feel it's more important to share information, including the ups and downs of training, racing, and life as an age group athlete, with emphasis on little nuggets of truth that might help the reader. The recent sharing of my solo bike crash was a hard one to share, not because I thought I might look like an incompetent cyclist but because I was concerned how it would affect the newbies who are just getting into triathlon and are already apprehensive about falling while riding. In the end Linda said that I should go ahead and post, along with the safety precautions that I took (helmet, eCrumbs tracker app, communicating where I was going and how long I'd be, carrying a cell phone, and wearing RoadID). I also shared that I made a couple of small mistakes while riding and so I pointed those out (inattentiveness, too close to the edge of the road) with the hope that it might serve as a reminder to the reader.

I have 2 new posts about ready: one was written the day before the crash and the other I just started about my current mental state. That 2nd one may not see the light of day because I'm not sure if I can get it to meet my self-imposed criteria of in some way being helpful to others.

Train smart, have FUN!