And then I reached out and gave you all a big hug

It is a little strange getting email from strangers asking questions to which you don’t have answers. Not because you don’t know answers, but because you never thought about it before.

As several who know me as well as my blog-type friends might have figured out by now, I’m seriously bad about getting to the emails. I read them all, I really do. And then, when I don’t have time to respond thoughtfully and completely well, I sometimes don’t come up with anything at all. So I just think I’ll do it later. Like later when I say I’ll update the links or when I say I want to revamp this site but then I never do. Because I run out of time, or don’t know where to go or what to do and am too busy/tired/dense to say HELP ME.

Anyway. Tangent. Oops.

Some things, though, beg a response. And being that I’ve had the question before, I’m even more excited that I now, too, have an answer!

I can’t figure you out. You talk about so many different things and seem to have too many different passions. I just can't figure out what kind of blog this is?

That was the inquisition I read over my caffeine yesterday morning. At first, I wanted to blow it off. “Too many different passions.” What 's that about? Perhaps, though, I know what it means. I do bounce around a lot here. I’ve had people say “I thought ‘Just Run’ would be more about running.” But you know, I never did. I thought, when I started writing here, that running was just a huge part of me, but not entirely me. And over the last year and a half, it’s been apparent that some people don’t want all the rest.

When I talk about running, races, shoes and knee injuries, I do enjoy it. Love it, in fact. If I didn’t have running, it’s tough to tell what kind of shape I’d be in (in every sense). But my emailer is right, there’s a lot more. I can go for weeks without talking about running because I’m hung up on people, the beach, music and a host of other distractions. Equal to running, I don’t know what life would be like without all these other obsessions, either.

Then I got to the part of the email that I found really interesting. The part I know an answer to for sure.

What kind of people do you expect to come here?

In short: Any people.

All of you I’ve found “out there” are who I want to come here. It matters not what you look like, what you wear, where you work or what you drive. It doesn’t occur to me that you might be different than me or that you have lost your hair or that you might write run-on sentences. I don’t think about if we like the same movies, make the same amount of money or have been to the same places. And I am so thankful that is the case.

Our lives and passions all intersect in some way, and somehow, we’ve all intersected here. That, for me, is what it’s about. You come to see me, I come to see you. I comment, or not. You comment, or not. It is what it is. This is all likely to end in much the same fashion it began, fairly uneventfully. But when it does, I’d like to think I opened myself and my words to everyone and always made it clear that you don’t have to be a woman or a runner or single or flip-flop wearer or anything else to relate to me. You just have to be you.

We are what we are. And I can’t thank you enough.