Brett Favre

This year was an interesting year for me on the whole. When the State Championships ended and the graduation season begins, the last of those who I ran with high school will have moved on. Everyone who is left was a freshman when I was a freshman ... in college. Maybe that was my first signal that it was time to hang it up.

The great thing about following this sport is someone new comes along every year with talent and potential to claim a state title. This year everyone from Tony Russell to Max Norris to Ethan Martin played that role. Next year's class of runners may be the best the state has ever seen, but if I wait around long enough someone new will always come along that is exciting and fun to watch that makes you want to stick around.

I've always loved blogging about this. Ever since I first took my dad's penntrack account and started posting, I knew that this was something I was passionate about. I never dreamed that a few posts on penntrack would grow into a blog that has captured over 400,000 views and won me a surprising amount of recognition and friendships. This blog has never been about money, it was never a job to me, it was fun, it was what I wanted to do and where I felt like I belonged. 

This blog has always been about more than me. I love when people say that I motivated them to be better and to prove me wrong, but that wasn't me, that was the competitiveness and determination of the athlete. My posts and my analysis are the things people can easily notice on the blog, but what you have to click and search for are the comments. The comments have always made this blog what it is. My words are more of a prompt to stir up the pot of the commentators out there. You all have made this blog special and powerful and I hope that when it is gone, you will continue to find ways to keep the discussion going and promote this sport that I have grown up with.

I haven't really seen to many HS XC or track races in person in the past 3 years since going to Muhlenberg College. It was very ironic to me that my blog didn't really get popular until I had graduated and been to school. I guess that's how artists feel when their work only becomes popular after their death. I guess that was probably a bit dramatic, but ...

It would be easy to keep going, put down the occasional post, slowly lose touch with who is out there and who is a strong runner and slowly lose quality in my posts and predictions and analysis. But I don't want to go out like that. I don't want to hang around past my prime or past my time. I don't want to be that awkwardly to old creepy guy at the meets.

If this was a job or something I was hired to do I would maybe feel differently about this all, but I think as simply a hobby, the time has come to stop being a blogger and an analyst for this level of sport.

I would love to go on and stay in the sport one day as either a coach or a writer for penntrack or dyestat or some other site, that would be a great job. But more likely I will end up as just another past runner or forum poster. I'm a math and economics double major at school. I'm doing work at Columbia this summer in Biostatistics and may go to graduate school for that. I also have taken the first actuarial exam and am considering entering that profession. 

It's odd to think that one of those careers is likely where I will be five years from now. Completely unconnected to this blog and to the high school track scene. The etrain name will likely disappear into obscurity and I'll just be back to Jarrett Felix.

But running will never leave my life. I will always be a runner, have a runner's personality, determination and work ethic. The girl I want to marry some day in the future is a runner and I would love for our children to pick up the sport because I feel it is a fantastic sport (no pressure though). My best friends are from running and my life would be so dramatically different if I had never stumbled upon penntrackxc for the first time so many years ago.

And I will likely never completely stop following the high school scene. I'll always be flipping around the results, maybe commenting somewhere anonymously or something like that. I could never stay away from this sport forever, any one who knows me at all knows that.

And maybe for that reason, you could see me again one day blogging. Maybe I won't be able to stay away. Maybe I will be another Brett Favre.

But for now, I am officially retiring from posting on this blog. It has been an amazing ride and I thank you all so much for what you have given me. This has been one of the coolest experiences of my life and I will never forget it.

Thank you so much. 

-train

And now etrain is gone and Jarrett Felix returns.