I have promises to keep; a job, full-time school as a doctoral student in music, and all of the assorted reading, listening, score study, and of course, practicing that is required to maintain that part of my life. On the polar opposite side, I have my running life, which occupies a lot of time, part of it is a giant release from the stresses of musicianship, and the simplification of everything that seems to result from hitting the trail before dawn, and running until I have to be somewhere, or on the best days, until I can’t anymore, has really put a lot of things in perspective, and helped me to evaluate things more clearly. Not to mention the overwhelming sense of good that has come out of it, having finally secured a stress reliever that feels natural, and pure, has helped me maintain my “cool” in ways I would have never imagined, there is no longer any need to sweat the small stuff, because in the grand scheme of things, it’s just not worth it.

Now it’s my goal to maintain a ~60-80 mpw average (excepting tapering) for the duration of the semester, in addition to my other life, and through the blog I’m planning on posting my mileage as well as my time spent running, AND my practice hourage (dedicated practice, excepting lessons/rehearsals/etc). This will hopefully keep me honest on both accounts, and hopefully fuel my practicing and running work ethic by having everything written down, and posted. On that note, I HAVE been keeping a running log, and have not missed a day since May 23rd (minimum 1 mile) and since that date I have logged 750.98 miles. I documented my practice time in the past, and my estimate is that I’m somewhere in the 8-9,000 hour range total, but my logging has been sporadic (mostly logging as a form of motivation, as this upcoming log will be) so this total number of hourage is at best, an educated guess. So I’ve added times to my running log, and restarted a practice log based purely on time, free, for the public to see. Now for those miles before I sleep..