First Post: Intro

I've never been all that interested in starting a personal blog like this; I've always thought of it as just an excuse to talk about oneself. Who ever wants to be the guy that just talks about himself? The guy who gives himself recognition for his own accomplishments? The guy who, in writing about his life, perhaps gives the reader (if anyone actually reads it) more information than they really wanted to know? I think the biggest problem this is going to cause me is that it will soak up a lot of my joke material. If I were to crack a joke on this new blog of mine, that joke is set in stone. It's in print! I'd never be able to use it again. Now I'm a guy who's constantly looking for opportunities to recycle jokes, and this is really just going to throw a whole new obstacle in my way of doing that.

Nevertheless, here I am. Starting my very own blog. It all started when I told Coach Jim Vahrenkamp about how I was going to be writing for the Augustana school newspaper, The Mirror, for credit this semester. I told him how I found out I would not be able to write any stories about the track team because it would be a "conflict of interest," Of course to which I responded "Where's the conflict? My interests completely coincide with track." (there's one joke out of my soon-to-be-dwindling arsenal). So Jim said, "Hey Ryan, you wanna write about track? Write for me. Write for the team's blog. Better yet, start your own. Journal your experiences as an Augie freshman on the team, I think it could be a real good recruitment tool."

Always looking for ways to help the team, I decided to do it.

So, here's my first post. Hopefully it's not too long, I tend to do that sometimes when I write. I guess I never introduced myself. My name is Ryan Evans, I hail from a suburb of the Twin Cities and I am a freshman at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD. I run on the cross country and track teams and I am an English major here at Augie, inspired by a love for writing. In this blog I will do just what I described in the earlier paragraph; I'll be reflecting on my experiences as a freshman on this awesome team, hopefully so that some recruits find it and get some use out of it. My first real post will be coming in a few days after I return home from the USATF Junior National Cross Country Championships in Spokane, WA this weekend. I'm really pumped for the race, and actually, thinking about writing about it afterwards is getting me pretty pumped about this whole blog idea. We'll see how it turns out.