On good days, the internal status of my head is similar to a rolodex. My attention flips through the roles and responsibilities of my life: Mom, Attorney, Runner, Writer…
Today it is more like a clothing dryer. I reach in, randomly pull things out to attend to, and then restart it.
A few things have been rolling around in my mind over the last few days. First, I signed up for my first triathlon. It is on July 25, 2014, the Spudman in Burley, Idaho. It’s an Olympic distance tri, so the swim is 0.93 miles (1.5k), the bike is 24.8 miles (40k), and the run is 6.2 miles (10k). I’ve been blabbing about breaking into the triathlon world for about a year, and I am finally doing it. Granted this is a little concerning, knowing my personality and personal mantra of Go big or go home. I don’t do things in a small way. What does that mean? An Ironman is likely to pop up on the horizon is what that means. Short term this means my butt needs to get back to the swimming pool and soon. My strength training is going to have to be sidelined for the next month until the race so I can work in swimming on Monday and Friday and cycling on Wednesday and then sometime on Saturday.
The second thing rolling around in my head is that one more of my runners has dropped from my relay team. The race is in less than a week. The chance of finding a runner who fits well with my team, has $130 laying around, and can run one of the hardest legs of the race is zilch, nada, zero. Even if it was possible, do I truly want another runner? We have a trailblazer, which is going to be a tight fit with six runners. It would be more comfortable with five runners. The opportunity to run Wasatch Back as an ultrarunner is too hard for me to pass up. I can pick up the extra miles. In fact, I would love to. It would make my total miles for the relay race jump from 20.8 to 36.3 miles.
The third thing is whether I start a second or even a third blog. I go back and forth on this. This blog is dedicated to life as a single mom and ultrarunner. But as you can see, if you follow it or flip through some of my prior posts, my writing life has snuck in through the back door. Other aspects of my life are clinging to the windowsills trying to claw their way in as well. The second blog could be dedicated to my writing life, but then I also like to post about being a mom of a bipolar child. Do I start a blog about that as well? That would take a lot of time. It would be easier for me to post everything on one blog, but then people who follow this blog for the running would be turned off by the writing and bipolar child posts, or would they? Then I get on my soapbox and tell myself, “It’s my freaking blog I can post what I want!”
It gets more complicated when I throw my day job into the mix and want to post something about advocating for child abuse and neglect victims and teens who are charged as adults and sent to prison (another issue I’m passionate about).
What it will ultimately come down to, is what my readers think so, please comment.
What are your thoughts and experiences on this issue? Does anyone know of a theme I could set up my blog to post on different threads and my readers could just click on whatever they are interested in? Or should I just keep it all in one stream?
ultrarunningmom 
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I like your dryer analogy… I get that feeling 100%.
I don’t know what to tell you about starting another blog except, I am glad you share your writing here. I am also a writer on the side, but I feel like I don’t let that shine through on my blog because it’s such a different side of me? I don’t know. Either way you decide, you should definitely keep sharing your work.
I’m excited to hear about your triathlon training. Swimming scares me – I like doing it, but I don’t know if I would ever be able to take away from one part of my life to be “good” at it. I know you will rock it, however, because you are so head strong.
Hope your relay situation works itself out. I’m sure you will figure out a good solution, even if it means picking up extra miles.
Best wishes this weekend.
It’s your freaking blog so you can post what you want!
Seriously, I think that for most people their primary reason for blogging is to put their thoughts down on a page. If others find something else there that interests them, so much the better. I write about running and the law (although not so much lately) and I know that’s a rather small niche that is never going to drum up a lot of readers. But that’s okay. There’s something for me to get from the exercise of writing and as long as I’m doing that I’m satisfied. If you want to write about other things, I say you should go for it. The folks who are really interested in what you have to say about the topics that drew them here will stick around and keep reading what interests them. If not, then that’s just their loss.