The Wednesday Post

Greetings from 5000 Miles!
The Avatar, just to be clear, has not run 5000 miles.

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We interrupt our tour of Washington for this important update from Central Missouri!

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I reached 5000 miles on Monday!  5000.83, to be exact.

What that means is, I've logged 5000 miles since I started keeping track in August 2009.  I had flirted with running off and on for eight or nine years at that point, and figured "hey, I like data.  Maybe keeping a spreadsheet would be a good incentive to track my mileage."  It has worked like gangbusters.

I didn't really notice the "5000 for Michael5000" thing until Mrs. pointed it out.  That has to be a post, she exclaimed, and sure, absolutely.  So we've got a postcard here from Marshall, Missouri, where the Avatar was hanging out the day before the big 5K happened.  The Avatar, just to be clear, has not run 5000 miles.  He came into being long after the spreadsheets did.  He has only run 2880.91 miles.

Since tracking my running is a jolly sort of obsessive-compulsive hobby that, as a side benefit, keeps me from ballooning up to 370 pounds, I've decided to keep a small, EXTREMELY niche-audience blog just for yapping about it: michael5000runs.blogspot.com/.  Feel absolutely no compulsion to look at it.  (Or on the other hand, if you share my enthusiasm for quantifying your physical fitness or other deeds of note, let me know and you can post to it too.  It could be, like, a numbers-driven mutual admiration society.)

We'll still want to check in with the Avatar here from time to time, of course, especially when he visits an art museum or sends in postcards.  In a few months, actually, I expect to take a trip where I will be able to track him down and see how he's doing.  Who knows!  Maybe I'll even go for a run with him.

Downtown Marshall, Missouri is still there.  Marshall has lost a lost of downtown buildings, but the church at the bend in Arrow Street (it's a curious thing about modern cities, that their streets are more permanent than are their buildings) is altered but recognizable, and the building just to the left of it is almost completely unchanged from this distance.  Country Floral Keepsakes, on the right, still describes itself as being "on the South Side of the Square."