10.27.2008

Master the short game

After writing my War and Peace length Race report for Newport this past week, I've learned one thing about blogging: I need to master the short post.

Wifey's comment when I told her I wrote a seven page race report was, verbatim: "Oh my God, no one is goign to read that." And she's right. Even I don't want to the whole thing. I took 15 minutes just to spell and grammar check it!

It doesn't help that everything surrounding a Marathon tends to be unusually long as well: long playlists, long training schedule, long long runs, long recovery time, etc.. I guess since I'm used to doing everything else running related in a long format the blog entries follow suit. Problem is that it then takes me forever plus a day to get a race report out the door. A really, I was just tired of waiting for me to finish it.

So I'm keeping this one short and promising more shorter ones in the future. Except for Gym Carnies. Those entires can go on forever and still be read word for word.

PS - It's so weird to not flag this post with "Manchester/Newport Training" label

3 comments:

Jess said...

Well, I'll be honest: When people post unusally long posts, I do skim parts of them, but I'm also a really fast reader (comes with the territory of my work and personal interests), so I never have to spend too long reading, even a long post.

However, I also think that blogging is for you, the blogger, not just for the readers, so sometimes you have to write a long post for yourself, not for the others. In your case, Newport was a significant, meaningful race for you, so the report was fitting to your sense of closure, I'm sure.

Nitmos said...

I read it waiting for the part where you poop your pants. As you know, I was disappointed. The letdown is the same as when reading a mystery novel only to find out at the end that victim dies of natural causes. but, nonetheless, it was a great run and a fine report. Not quite as long as Don Quixote though...

B. Kramer said...

I hope nitmos makes a similar pledge.