Well, well, well… look who came down with a feverish bout of the blog bug!  Yes, friends, I am officially back and beginning to get serious with this running business yet again after a wee 4 year hiatus in competitive distance running.  Wow! Just writing that sentence makes my stomach turn inside—4 YEARS! 4 years of essentially going through the motions with the sport I love so much (all one would need to do is look up some results of mine in the past few years to see this!)

But why, Gerry? Why, you may ask? Well, unfortunately, this scenario is an overpowering reality for many post-collegiate runners who set out into the world and unwittingly leave behind the competitive atmosphere that they once thrived under.  It’s not that I lost my passion for running during this time (I have been more or less running with some consistency since I left college) but it lies in the fact that you definitely lose a little fire when training and racing are no longer the primary focus in your life.  At the same time, I consider myself actually quite fortunate to have taken a little breather from competitive running because I have been able to concentrate on fulfilling other aspects of my life, the most gratifying and rewarding of these being becoming a husband, and now a father!

I feel like I have been hanging on to the nostalgia of the career I left behind in college, and only until recently have I felt ready and willing to give myself another chance to renew that lulled fire within me and propel myself to bigger and better things in running!

So here I am… geared-up, grizzled (well, I am 27!), and GNARLY now that I have this hip, new running blog! I plan on posting details of my training a couple of times a week, and with my love for design, you can bet there will be plenty of eye candy and the occasional video of some of my specific training runs (I use Sony Vegas Pro 9 for video editing).  Since I train mostly alone, for the past two years my “go-to” training partner has been the steadfast “Garmin 205 Forerunner Watch,” and so you can expect all the distances and times posted on here to be pretty damn accurate.  I believe it is important to be as transparent as possible pertaining to training details, so coupled with my Garmin and workout videos, you will see the entire spectrum of my training from the ugly blow-ups to the encouraging triumphs in head-on, brutal honesty.  Seriously, every runner who doesn’t own one yet should definitely have a Garmin Forerunner watch on their wishlist this year!!

I thank-you for visiting my blog and hope you come back often to check in with me and, of course, to….. RUN WITH GROOTHUIS! (man, it’s fun being cheesy, eh?)