Hi there! I’m Whitney or RunningWhit as I’m known on my blog.  I began my blog in March 2010 with the help of my friend Lyndi. I began with a blog post that was officially four sentences long including the one word sentence, “Thanks!” After that I quickly found my way and began to write posts recapping races that I did and my training adventures.

I initially discovered blogs as I would research races and try to get some insights into race courses. One of the first bloggers that I followed hosted a giveaway but you had to be a blogger to enter so that planted the seed for me of wanting to have a blog. Prizes! What can I say, I love prizes! I quickly discovered there was more to blogging than just giveaways. There was so much information available and so many different types of blogs to follow. As a new triathlete I was eager to learn about training plans and race strategies and through blogs I was able to learn more than I could through books and magazines that weren’t written by people like me with a full time job training and racing for fun.

Over the past four years of blogging, Arkansas Women Bloggers has been one of the biggest surprises for me. At one of the first AWBU conferences one of the speakers made the comment that bloggers are writers too. It sounds so simple, yet to me it hadn’t even crossed my mind… I know that sounds like it doesn’t make any sense!

Growing up I lacked confidence in writing. It was one of my least favorite subjects so much so that my mom mandated that I take Freshman Composition class in college even though I had tested out of it.  She knew that I needed to be more confident in my writing in order to be a successful student in the rest of my college career.  Fast forward to AWBU and one of the speakers saying that bloggers are writers and I was a little taken aback. I had a blog but I most definitely was not a writer and all this talk of having a voice, huh? After letting this concept sink in, I realized that it was going to be okay if my blog meant I was a writer too. The label didn’t mean that I had to change my writing style(otherwise known as my voice) and much to the disdain of some I love to use the “…”and you’ll find it in my writing quite often!

I’m excited to spend the next month with all of you talking about the theme of START! There are so many things that you can START this month and this year. It’s truly never too late to START living the life you want to and for me that means putting together a calendar for my year of all the races that I’m interested in doing and of course I make sure to block out a fall weekend for AWBU! It’s going to be fun to share some of my other interests with you as we kick off 2014 with a great START!

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