What's in a name?

Deciding to jump into the blog world was a hard enough decision in itself. Although, now after a little over 2 weeks of blogging, I am very glad I did! After deciding that I would start a blog, my next question to myself was, “What in the world is the name going to be?” I could tell you that I pondered it for weeks, that I had many sleepless nights trying to decide, and that I researched the heck out of it. But that would be a lie. It took me a day to decide. And not a full day, but a day of thinking about it off and on and doing a little research here and there. I’m the type of person that when I decide to do something, I wanted it done 10 minutes ago. When I do get my mind set on something, it’s very difficult to change it. Not that I’m an impulse type of person, but after I have thought about something for what I feel is long enough, then that’s the end of it. Decision has been made, now let’s move on!

I knew that I wanted the title to have something about running in it. I had decided that running was going to be a main focus, but I also knew that it was not going to be all I blogged about. Running is so much more than...well, running. And I knew I wanted to share my running journey along with my journey of everyday life. I started with a list of 25 possible titles and then after some thinking, narrowed it down to 5. I put those into blogger to see if they were available. That cut out 3 titles for me so I was left with 2. I kept coming back to “Running Between the Lines”, so that was the winner!

After thinking about this title for a while, I kept thinking what it meant to me. The way I came up with it originally was thinking about the Start line and the Finish line in a race. “Between the Start and the Finish” just didn’t have the ring I wanted in a title, but “Running Between the Lines” worked. And for me, it meant the same thing, plus much more.

There are so many emotions that you go through in a race, especially in longer distances. There are butterflies when you’re standing on the start line. There is excitement when you hear that gun go off. You have so much adrenaline at the beginning of the race, then that adrenaline slowly runs out after running for so long. At about mile 19 you wonder, “Can I really finish this?” Then you are powered by nothing more than your heart! And finally when you are on the last stretch and all those people are cheering you on, you get a huge burst of adrenaline. You finish strong, and then the biggest rush of emotion comes over you after realizing that you just finished a 26.2 mile marathon. There are so many emotions between that start line and that finish line!

And is it not the same with life? Life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. There are times you feel on top of the world like you can accomplish anything. And there are times when all you want to do is sit down and quit. But you push through the hard times to more fully enjoy the good times. And hopefully when we come to our own life’s finish line, we can look back and be proud at what we accomplished. And at that time, at our own life’s finish line, we can rest. But until then, we keep going and just enjoy the race of life!

So I hope you enjoy my journey of “Running Between the Lines”.