Since last fall, I’ve been considering relaxing my firm commitment to the weekly cadence of publishing the blog. I started the blog as an experiment and committed to shipping weekly for at least a year. Having now written weekly for over two years and shipped over 100 posts, I consider it a highly successful experiment. I have had a lot of fun with it. It’s catalyzed many interesting and unexpected conversations with family, friends, and professional contacts, and been excellent validation for how highly I value synthesizing thought in writing. Looking back at my initial goals I feel I’ve satisfied all of them.

The motivation for writing the blog has always been intrinsic. More recently, the number of times I have started to feel writing the post is a chore has grown to a higher proportion than I would like. It’s certainly not a burden every week, and I never expected writing a weekly post to feel exclusively joyous as no meaningful work ever really is, but the ratio is currently too lopsided.

This past week, I didn’t ship for the first time. It wasn’t a mistake or unintentional. I simply decided, I don’t want to ship something forced and it’s time to make a change. My biggest fear with dropping the weekly commitment, and what has prevented me from taking action to date, is sacrificing a hard and fast rule means I run the risk of de-prioritizing writing and it never happening. The perspective I’ve seen shared by professional authors on writing is unanimous: great writing cannot be achieved unless practiced often and consistently, and it’s not exclusively a joy. Sometimes it sucks and that is part of the process. But I am not a professional writer, and this is only a creative passion.

So with that, I am dropping my commitment to ship on a weekly basis but will maintain the blog and ship something when I have an urge to do so. I’m not certain how frequently that will be. This decision feels right and as with all experiments, I’ll change course over time as needed. Thank you to everyone who has engaged with me on the content. That has been a motivator for me over time.

This week, Julia, Henry, and I are off on vacation to Vienna and Barcelona in celebration of my mother-in-law Catherine’s (aka ‘Big C’) retirement and 60^th birthday. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have Catherine as my MIL; I genuinely enjoy spending time with her, and we have always gotten along splendidly. Our shared love of Julia, and of having a good time, gave us a solid foundation to build on.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time with Catherine and learned a great deal. She has a unique ability to get along with and immediately befriend everyone without restraining her strong opinions on many subjects. That is a rare and nuanced skill, and she’s mastered it. Additionally, I give credit to Catherine for making me a more empathetic person and holding less judgement than I might have ten years ago; “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”, as she says.

Catherine has always seemed keenly aware of her own mortality and placed a high value on the pursuit of a good time and living in the moment; life is short and she takes advantage. I have always respected that and look forward to continued good family times.

Last week, I ran the Toronto marathon, and Julia ran the half-marathon. It was a big success all around; I felt great and cut almost 30 minutes off my last run and Julia achieved her goal of beating my half marathon PR, thus taking the Owen Cord family crown.

I choose to rawdog my races; no headphones. One of my favourite parts of a race is taking in the bystanders, reading the signs, and seeing the festivities along the course. There are the common, dad-jokey generic ones:

• “You paid for this!”
• “All this for a banana?!”
• “Today, you’re allowed to finish fast”
• “Whine now, wine later”
• “The pain is temporary, the Strava lasts forever”
• “You run better than the government”
• “You’re still faster than the TTC”
• “Rats don’t run the city, you do!”
• “Run if you think I’m sexy”
• “I trained for months to hold this sign”

And then some unique ones, which I always appreciate:

• “Don’t worry, if you fail your run here, you can always run again in Alberta!”
• “Run like your mama flew in from Mexico to watch you!”
• “[name] hurry up, I’m hungry”
• “Anything to avoid therapy”

The last time I ran a marathon was pre-Henry and I underestimated the time commitment involved; it was a lot, especially the last 6 weeks leading up to the race. Many other things took a back seat. I’m fortunate to have a supportive partner in Julia or the training schedule wouldn’t have been possible. I love running but not enough to make it such a priority in my life right now and so I’ll be taking a break for the foreseeable future.