I hope all you holiday celebrating folks had a fine time this week. We went (as we have for the last 4 years) to our very close friend’s house in upstate NY with the other annual Xmas invitees – so there were nine of us doing the Secret Santa thing, eating exquisitely prepared food (when’s the last time you had poussin?), hiking in the woods and jabbering for two days.

Now I’m back and in a strange mood. Ordinarily, the first thing I’d do when coming home is jump on the computer, check email and then the forums, but something’s going on in my brain, leaving me less enmeshed in the forum life as I have been.

Without a doubt, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time on running forums this year, sometimes to my boyfriends detriment, and my own as a result. It’s been hard to concentrate on anything else – even the novels I dutifully check out from the library every few weeks end up sitting on the night table, unread, because the only words I’m able to ingest are about running and other people’s running.

If I was going to be brutally honest, and I will be, I’ve been embarrassed about my prolific forum participation for months now, ever since I emailed a race report link to my non-running friends, so they could check out my race pictures and see what I was up to. It wasn’t till I’d sent the link that I realized A) I’d given my non-running friends access to my inner running world which in retrospect I wish I’d kept separate and B) I’d already racked up over 1000 posts on the forum since February, which seemed easy enough to accumulate by congratulating people for their races and breakthroughs, plus my own questions and advice – and while none of my non-running friends mentioned the high post-count to me (probably didn’t even notice), I’ve been pretty self-conscious about it since.

So here I am, back in the saddle (computer chair) and perusing with less energy than usual. Funny thing though, moments after I started writing this entry, I gave a quick once-over to the RW forum and found someone had posted a thread with my name in the title, thanking me for something I’d written a while back. It was so lovely to be called out and made me feel great to have been a help. And then I checked my team thread (I’m in a mileage team where you post your weekly mileage and share the weeks’ highlights) and it looks like one of our team members is slyly announcing her pregnancy in a tricky way, so ok, I’m going out for a run now but will check back to see if my guess is correct and…

Oh, who am I kidding? If 2007 was the year of the Forum Freak, 2008’s version will be a little laid back, still in existence, but less obsessed and a touch more absent – a Forum Freakette, if you will.

And now, it’s time to get on with that run, but first let me just check out that website we were we talking about over Xmas dinner. What was it? Oh yeah, www.secondlife.com. Funny, but everyone warned me not to go there, they said I’ll probably never emerge from this room if I do, and Nick had a real worried look on his face, so I’ll just take a tiny little peek…

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