Jill Will Run

The voice behind this blog… it’s mine. I write the content.  And I make the decisions. And I make the mistakes.  It’s my stomping grounds and just like almost anything in this online world, if someone doesn’t like it they are welcome to surf away to another site or close their browser.  But on the flipside of that, I love love love that people do read my writings and ramblings and comments make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I strive to keep this site authentically Jill.  I started it because I enjoy rambling about running. I started reviewing products that I bought on my own simply because I enjoyed that.  I try to write them in a way so that people find them useful, but also so that hopefully other people may stumble upon them in search engines.  My goal is really to help others and share information about the products from my perspective.

I have read articles about SEO and writing titles to pull people in… encouraging you to write titles that scream “X many steps to Something Fantastic” or “The Surefire Method to becoming Superhuman” or some kind of claims that are just not reality.  And I can’t bring myself to write things like that… it doesn’t feel authentic to me.  And when I see other sites doing that (and writing more and more and more of their posts using structure like that) I question that author’s sincerity.

I’ve thrown my hat into the ring for a couple of online gigs recently, FitFluential and the nuun Hood to Coast team.  I was not picked for FitFluential in the first round.  And I didn’t get selected to be on the nuun teams, but I am chosen to be an alternate.  I could have written much flashier posts in my pleading to be named to those, but what I did was authentic to me.  I think the perspective of health and fitness I presented for FitFluential is a positive one and is different from a lot of those in the health blogging genre.  And my nuun attempt was completely honest… I was a nuun fan far before I heard about the team and I had tweeted, facebooked and blogged about them before without any promise of free product or awesome race experience.  So even though I’m not flatout selected for either of those items right now, I feel okay about it because I felt like I didn’t stray from me.

I consider this a running blog first.  But I also consider it a health and wellness site as well as a positive body image site.  I would love to expand on those offerings in areas that are of interest to me.  I love reviewing products, but if something is completely against my philosophies or standards, I wouldn’t review it… even if it was offered to me for free. I just can’t do that.

My main reason for putting this all out here is that I’ve been really thinking a lot about blogging lately. I would love to be able to spend more time on blogging and I would love to have a larger following, but I can’t do it at the expense of who I am. I lost too much of who that gal was for a long time and am just starting to unearth her again.

So I’m trying to be Authentically Jill… and allowing the evolution of what makes me authentic happen without judgment or labeling or discrimination. I am what I am… Jill.