I’ve been struggling to write on Medium as much as I once did. When I look at how I spend my days, a big chunk is running. Not just the act of running, but changing my clothes, grabbing my watch, headphones and water, driving to where I run, warming up, running, cooling down, and driving home. It’s 1.5–2 hours almost every day. I signed up for a half-marathon in November, and I’ll need to run even more for that. Is it silly to spend so much time training to run faster and longer?

4 Reasons Running is a Good Use of My Time

I get a lot of value out…

When I turned 30, I felt okay about it. I was satisfied with where I was in life and saw plenty of open road ahead. On my fortieth birthday, my husband threw me a surprise party and put me back in touch with some old friends. Life is better if you have some buddies. Thanks, John for that gift. Life moves on.

Fifty. Now turning fifty hurt a little. Probably my own fault. I still remember when my mother turned 50. “You’re half a CENTURY,” I had teased. “That’s almost a quarter of the time this COUNTRY has been around!”

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Programmer by Day/Author by Night

How I Became a Programmer by Day, Author by Night

I’ve always loved stories. Dr. Seuss and fairytales when I was little and people were reading to me. The Boxcar Kids, the Black Stallion series and books about dogs (because we didn’t have one) when I got older.

I had a pretty tame, middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1970’s. I’m a bit younger than the generation that went to Vietnam or lost older brothers to it. Even then, I knew that I was lucky.

I attended Dartmouth College, studied computer science, got married, and had my first son by the time I turned 21. Being…