The Beginning

My name is Terry Bartley and I am a runner. I am now anyway. This is a new thing for me, I've actually never been too big on the whole "exercise" thing. But now, I aspire to be a marathon runner.

I realize all of this sounds like an episode of MTV's Made. The kid that was always overweight in school spent his days looking up to the runner's dedication and feels that if maybe he could be like them he could take on the world. This isn't exactly like that.

Honestly, I never thought of my weight as a huge problem. I hid it well enough. I was pretty drastically overweight, but I was surprised at the number of people that told me things such as, "I never thought you were that overweight," after I dropped 40 pounds. I pretty much always knew I could take on the world, what I didn't know was just how easy it was to motivate myself.

I was a journalism major at Marshall University with a penchant for all this "New Media" stuff, one day I had an idea to make a reality podcast about myself losing weight. I ate healthy, played Dance, Dance Revolution pretty heavily and before I knew it, got in pretty decent shape. The podcast never actually happened, but whatever. That's when it hit me. If I can convince myself I'm doing something to entertain others, I can get myself to do pretty much anything.

That brings me to now. I've slacked a ton on healthy eating and exercise, but have somehow managed to maintain my somewhat reasonable weight. I realize, however, that this isn't good enough. I want to actually be healthy, not just appear as such. So I devised a new scheme, I would set a new goal: Run a marathon by the end of the year. Which brings me to this blog. I'll be documenting everything I learn about the relatively-foreign-to-me world of running, and hopefully teach all of you things along the way.

This blog is for anyone curious about running, any established runners that would love to point out exactly what I'm doing wrong from time to time and of course, those that love to hear of others in pain, because I'm also sure I'll be going through tons of that. Wish me luck blogosphere, here I go.