Who's been looking after this place? (Or: A brief history of the virtual me)

I started keeping this blog in April -- my first foray into building a dedicated running blog in about nine years. Within a few weeks, I let it lapse into neglect. Some of this was a result of laptop woes -- did you know you don't have to dump water on the keyboard to hose the unit; you can actually just set it down in a very shallow puddle? -- but by the time I got those taken care of, I had already lost momentum.

But nothing really ugly happened with my running or creative drive in that time. Really, I'm just not sure of the feasibility of this project. Things are simply not the same for runners (and others) wishing to project their voices across the Internet as they were in 2006.

I was probably one of the first halfway-decent runners to have his own Web site. I tossed up my first version of this in 1998. It was hosted by Media One, one of many smaller cable and Internet providers that was later swallowed up by Comcast. In 2001, right before the marathon in which I would set my lifetime personal best, I bought my own domain name. kevinbeck.com was taken by a fellow who does watercolor painting in North Carolina, so I stole kemibe.com off my own license plate. If you don't know where "KEMIBE" comes from, you should be able to formulate a reasonably good guess.

Anyway, have a look at the oldest cached version of kemibe.com that's not riddled with dead links. It's about what you might expect of a hand-coded personal Web page from that era. I thought it was especially progressive to have a little weather widget embedded in there. And the message board wasn't what it would become in future years, but was fairly active.

By 2004, when I was sentenced to live in South Florida for a couple of years, I had heard of "blogs" and debated starting my own. I didn't really see what novelty a blog would add to a Web site that already featured regularly updated personal content from its owner. For years, the message board and my "Odometer" (which topped 5,200 miles in 2002) together took care of keeping anyone who cared apprised of what I was up to, both with my running and outside of it. Still, because I've always liked to hear myself talk at least as much as other people at times, I integrated a Blogger.com blog into my existing site and named it "Cognitive Emesis." I started it in August 2004 and kept it up for about a year and a half. From the start I made it clear that it would not be only or even primarily about running, and it wasn't. This didn't stop a few people from bellyaching about the lack of running content, although most of them were actually complaining about my personal politics of the day under the aegis of wanting to read more about my running. I think that this is the most current cached version available.

2005 now stands my last year of halfway serious running. I was knocked out for most of the summer by a sports hernia, and after I recovered from this I ran a couple of half-ass half-marathons and other races before the calendar rolled over to 2006. I released myself from South Florida on my own recognizance and retured to southwestern Virginia, which remains the most peaceful and laid-back place I've ever had the pleasure of living in. At about the same time, having decided that "Cognitive Evidence" was more trouble than it was worth, I joined Alison Wade's eliterunning.com network, which soon moved to running-blogs.com. I didn't keep this project, also called "Beck of the Pack," going for very long at all. By the middle of 2006 I was blogging almost exclusively about science, "culture wars" and random bullshit for scienceblogs.com on a group blog called "Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge." This blog survives today at www.chimprefuge.com, but I don't update it much probably never will. I long ago tired of starting arguments about things that half the world is already arguing about and that do not lend themselves to peaceful resolution.

And now? The biggest issue is that there must be many hundreds of runners with blogs they update regularly. Most of these are not very interesting, and serve mainly as publicly available personal diaries. Even runners who are fast don't necessarily create compelling content. I can think of two exceptions off the top of my head: 2:14 marathoner Nate Jenkins and 2:28-er Lauren Kleppin. (Sadly, Lauren doesn't update hers anymore, but what's there will always be a treat.)

Anyway, between the advent of social media and the glut of personal pages and blogs, it's unlikely that this blog will become at all popular unless I make a concerted effort to force-feed it to people. If I follow through with the podcasts I have promised, an idea that is still very much a go, this could rapidly change.

Meanwhile, I got in 64 miles last week, including 15 yesterday in three runs. I will likely take a stab at a 5:00 mile at the Boulder Road Runners all-comers meet on Thursday at C.U.'s Potts Field. I don't expect to be race-fit until fall -- and I still won't recognize what "race-fit" even means at 45 after a long competitive hiatus until I've tussled with a few courses at sea level -- but the summer series is a fun place to just hang out and bullshit. Kind of like a fleshier blog, I reckon.