Who Reads These Things Anyway?

When tri-buddy John & I started this blog, we didn’t know who, if anyone, was looking at this thing. We have a half dozen or so people that are registered as “Followers” of the blog. That’s not a great number in the blog world. Other triathlon blogs I follow have much bigger numbers. I don’t know if these people have more friends than us, if they are younger than us and their friends are more technologically keyed into the whole blog thing, or if they are just better bloggers then us.

In any event, we tend to think that just a couple of people are looking at this thing. Occasionally, I’ll be at an event and someone will tell me that they read a particular entry. I get somewhat taken aback at this, but I am generally pleased at the fact that anyone is checking it out.

When I was setting up my Facebook account, I realized that I could link my blog entries to Facebook. So, I linked it up without giving it much thought. The week after I posted my entry entitled: “On Death & Dying...and Being Alive,” I got several comments on FB about the entry. I also had people bring it up in conversations the week or so afterwards. When I brought this up to co-blogger John, his comment was “You have to treat any of this stuff on the Internet like it was being published on front page of the New York Times.” Little did we know.

After my ride on Sunday, I make it to the Greek church John & I attend. John is Greek and I happen to be fortunate enough to have married a beautiful Greek woman. At the social hour after services, I see John’s mother, Molly at a table with my mother-in-law, Kiki, and their friend, Penny. As I chat with them, Molly says to Penny, “Oh, you have to read their blog.” “What?” I say taken by surprise. “You read our blog?” Molly then explained to me how she was interested in whether her grandson, Matt, a high school cross country runner, had any published road race results on-line. She was aware that John had gotten his brother Mike and his nephews Matt and Andrew to run a 5K in late December with us.

So, she Googled the name “Matt Clidas.” Up comes our blog name in her search results. “What’s this?” she wonders and clicks onto our blog page. I had blogged about the race and included Matt’s full name in the entry. (Is that a blog "no no"?) Thus, Molly found our blog. Fortunately, she had very nice things to say about the blog, so all is well. How she managed to keep this under wraps from both her son John and me for four months, I’ll never figure out. Molly is a very gregarious woman who likes to talk. I now know I can tell her any secret and it will be safe. With all the nice things she had to say, we my have to hire her to market our blog. As for you other bloggers: Let’s be careful out there. You never know who has your blog book-marked in their Favorites folder. As for Molly: you keep on reading and we'll keep on writing.

Finally, our friend Linda Paige completed her first triathlon last weekend. Way to go Linda! Congratulations and welcome to the fold.