A NATURE BLOG FOR THE REST OF US
Why running with binoculars? This is the story of how I came up with the idea for this blog. I am a runner, a very fast runner. I ran track and cross country in high school until my senior year when I had a strange lapse in judgment and did not come back, at least not until after graduation. I came back as an alumnus and ran with the new team. It was during that summer that I noticed my knee hurting very badly. I did not run again for a very long time.
Zoom ahead a few years to after graduating from college. I had a friend from my college days who always wanted to do something crazy for his birthday. He had already gone skydiving the year before. This year he decided to run a half marathon. I believe the ideas did not have to escalate in craziness from year to year. I told him he can’t have all of the fun this time around because I was going to run it with him. Four weeks later we drive two and a half hours to Quincy, IL to run our first half marathon. It was the most challenging race I had competed in at that point. I ended up finishing before my friend but I was beat.
After this race I started looking for others. I never knew how many 5ks and 10ks were out there. I ran a few local races and then returned to Quincy the following year to compete in the 5k. Looking at the finishing times from the previous year, I had a feeling that I could win the race. I ended up only getting 15th place. I ran it again the next year. 15th place again. I found a few more races, trying to stay more local this time. My favorite races in the St. Louis area were the Frostbite Series and Wild in the Woods trail series. I liked the idea of gaining points that accumulated from event to event.
I made a life goal of running a half marathon in every state. I had two down so I decided to get one distant state out of the way. I picked Arizona and ran a desert half marathon as part of a series. It was the most amazing race I had ever run. By this time my knee was giving me serious issues. When I returned to Illinois I couldn’t even finish a mile without extreme pain. I was determined to rehabilitate my knee so that I could keep going. However, there was another issue. I had found a new sport.
In December of the previous year, I learned about birding. I never knew that people logged birds in a year-long list as part of a competition. I thought to myself, I’m good at identifying animals, I could be really competitive at this. I was already a bug guy. Beginning in January, I started counting birds. I found myself unable to keep running because I was trying to look at all the birds on the way. I bought some cheap binoculars and started running with them. My road trip to Arizona was in March of that year and I was more excited about what birds I could see than the actual race.
After three months and only logging a few species of birds, I realized that it was not going to be as easy as I thought. It was hard to fit all of these hobbies into my already busy life. I’ve pretty much quit running as a sport. I haven’t participated in any races since Arizona. I still feel like I’m running though. Running kids to school, running to work, running to the store. Everyday trying to fit everything I needed to do into a timeslot.
I read other blogs about birders visiting cool places all of the time and finding amazing birds. I started to wonder if I’m the only naturalist who has a job. I only saw birds on my way to work. I started riding my bike to work so I could count birds easier and because I enjoy riding. I found I was able to get more rides in and more birding by doing it this way. I decided to take a step back from my job, go back to school and finish my Biology degree. I started going to more interesting birding spots, met other birders, got more family members into birding. Now I’m ready to start this blog; a blog about a regular, busy working husband and father who loves nature and exercise. I’m going to take my readers wherever I go to look for cool creatures and dream some day of being able to work with them, to make nature my business. So, let’s bird it up!