Happy Birthday, Blog!

So this is a big one – it’s been a whole year [12 months! 52 weeks! 365 days! I could go on!] since I made Quinn Runs a public site and first entreated you all to come read my posts here. Where did the time go?! It’s at once crazy, amazing, and even a little bit scary as I look back on the past year of my life and the past year of working on this blog and realize how fast it flew by.

What I want to give you guys today is kind of a reflective post about what I’ve put into Quinn Runs as well as what the site and Instagram and, most importantly, community have given back to me. But first, a quick little recap of where this all began. If you want to read any of the very plentiful posts detailing specific aspects of my physical and mental fitness journey, you know where to find them [hint: my home page], so this is just going to be an abbreviated quickie version.

Previously on Quinn Runs: In the fall of 2018 as I started my junior year of college, I started doing something that I honestly had never even considered before. You guessed it—running. I had just come off a summer of changing my exercise and eating habits, which eventually resulted in my happily and healthily losing about twenty-five pounds. I was feeling confident and strong in my body, and I decided to take a chance on running. At that point, I would have absolutely never called myself a “runner,” and in fact frequently complained that “I just can’t run.” Looking back, I almost don’t remember how it happened. It feels like I just fell into it, but I don’t really believe that’s true. I believe that I was finally in a place with my physical fitness and with a newfound positive mindset about my body and about exercise that allowed me to put myself in a vulnerable position and try something that I wasn’t sure if I would succeed at.

I started running one or two miles a couple times a week. Yeah, it was definitely a slow start, but it really worked for me because I quickly found myself wanting to run a little bit farther than I had on the previous run, and suddenly I was doing three miles pretty consistently. Turns out, 3.1 miles is a 5K. Once I could do three, I could soon do four, and it suddenly felt like I could just keep going with it, could just keep stacking the miles on little by little and get some substantial distance. And then I impulsively looked up half-marathon training plans after running four miles on the treadmill one day.

In retrospect, I realize that what almost feels like an accident, this whole getting-into-running thing, was actually a huge part of making a commitment to myself and following through on my fitness goals in a way that I had never done before. Because, you know, it wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate decision to see what I was capable of. It was getting up earlier before class to make time for my runs. It was pushing myself to go farther and farther during each Sunday morning long run, first by myself and then later with my running pals. It was proving to myself that I could do anything I set my mind to.

It might sounds a little cheesy, but I really stand by that. Not only had I always thought of myself as a person who couldn’t run, but I had also thought of myself as a person who couldn’t finish things. I considered myself lacking in the departments of discipline, self-control, and willpower. I’ve always been someone who has a lot of ideas but proportionately little follow-through—I think my writing is a great example of this phenomenon. I’m constantly coming up with ideas for stories or novels or just seeds of something that hasn’t totally taken shape yet, and getting just so wildly passionate about them. I’ll jot them down, start writing furiously, and then never come back to them. Even if I do write a little bit on something, I’ll end up abandoning it after twenty pages or maybe fifty pages in favor of a newer, more exciting idea. So I guess it’s got something to do with focus too. But anyway, I kind of just accepted this as part of my personality: Quinn, girl who never finishes things.

When I started running, I would have never predicted that four months later I would be crossing the finish line of my first half-marathon holding hands with the two amazing friends that I ran it with. Quinn, girl who never finishes things, would not have done that. So had I become someone else? This realization, that I could follow through on things I was passionate about, was a major moment of personal growth for me. It seems so obvious now—of course I could do that if I really wanted to. But at the beginning of all of this, it appeared a total impossibility.

Let’s pivot back to the blog itself now [this is its birthday celebration, after all]. Sure, I could have done all kinds of running and training without cataloging any of it or writing about it. But I maintain that the writing and posting and creating a community of support through this site and through my Quinn Runs Instagram were instrumental not only to my success in completing the half-marathon, but also to my personal growth throughout the process. Running this blog has given me the opportunity to think deeply about every part of my health, ranging from physical fitness to my relationship with food to my emotional and mental happiness. Without this outlet to catalog and share my thoughts, I don’t think I would have recognized how much running was benefiting me in all of these areas. I don’t think I would have been able to appreciate and utilize my progress as a person if I hadn’t been engaging in the introspection necessary to create these posts.

So this is the part where I say thank you. Thank you so much, to each and every person who reads my lengthy Instagram captions, to every pal who shoots me a text to say they loved a blog post or it really resonated with them, to every lovely individual who rocks their Quinn Runs t-shirt around campus. It’s amazing to be part of this community of people, and I feel so genuinely lucky. When I first created the Instagram, which preceded the blog by a couple weeks, I wanted a way to keep myself accountable. I figured that publicizing my goals and workouts would force me to stick to them. Although I definitely appreciate all of the support and well wishes in comments, likes, etc., I have found that the motivation comes from another place entirely.

I’m sure motivation takes slightly different forms for each person. But for me, it became important to find a drive from within myself, rather than depending on those around me to create an environment in which I could succeed. In this spirit, I’ve discovered that it’s not accountability that drives me, but rather relatability. I don’t want to run because I’ve committed to other people, I want to run and blog about it and post about it because I’ve committed to myself and I hope to inspire that attitude in others. I hope to write about topics that resonate with the people who read my posts, that might make even just one of you think “hey, I’m not alone here.” I hope you see me running down the street and think “If she can do that, I can do that. If I want to.”

In seeking an environment of accountability and support, which you guys have provided for me in so many amazing ways, I think I also ended up creating that environment for myself [and ideally others!] and becoming self-assured enough to do so. I’ve put a lot of myself into Quinn Runs, and have allowed myself to be vulnerable and open with you all in the contents of my posts—wait.

Here’s what I was about to write: I’ve put a lot of myself into Quinn Runs, and have allowed myself to be vulnerable and open with you all in the contents of my posts, and all I can hope is that it’s been meaningful to some people. But then I realized the obvious. It’s been incredibly meaningful to ME. Obviously, I hope you guys have enjoyed reading some of these posts and engaging with my thoughts about food and fitness, and I do hope that you’ve connected with some of my ideas and experiences. But at the end of the day, this has been a valuable experience for myself, and if that’s the only thing it is, then that’s enough. I am very, very grateful to Quinn Runs for providing this forum through which I thought, wrote, shared, and grew.

And now for some fun stuff! Quinn Runs stats! I have lots of analytics about the site through Squarespace: how many visitors, from which states and countries, how many views on each post, etc. So initially I was going to share some of that information with you all. But I’m not sure those are the numbers that matter, so here are some other stats instead that definitely do matter. Since last January, I’ve written 45 blog posts and uploaded 190 instagram posts. I’ve run four half-marathons and now I’m in the process of training for my first full one. I just tried to go back in my fitness apps and count all of my runs since then, but that’s a pretty big project, so I’m going to do some estimation instead. I normally run four times per week, probably missed a few in there, so let’s say that in the 52 weeks of this past year I ran about 200 times. Those are some pretty cool numbers, if I do say so myself.

All in all, my point is that I love working on this blog and I love sharing it with you ! I’m so excited to celebrate the one-year anniversary of its publication, and I hope that it has a long life ahead of it. Save some dire circumstances, there will definitely be more Quinn Runs coming your way in 2020! Happy birthday, blog!