A New Focus for the New Year

I thought long and hard about what to do with this blog after spending yet another year essentially documenting my decline.

As we age, our reasons for running change. Our bodies change too. My physical therapist last night told me that the older we get, the more we shift from being uber fit to just trying to stay flexible. It takes some people like me longer to transition, but I'm finally there.

"Project Me" is still going strong, and running remains an important part of my grand plan to look and feel better when I turn 50 a few months from now. But I'm also going to return to this blog's roots and devote more posts to research I come across in my current profession. In this case, I'm going to write about the most important organ we engage when we run: the brain.

I already do a lot of reading on cognitive science at work as it relates to Alzheimer's and dementia. But this upcoming year, I'm going to share more of what I learn because we could all stand to devote more attention to how and why we think as we do. I also think the topic has broad appeal because every family has at least one member with mental illness, and it's a family's inability to adequately address those dysfunctions that often destroys people. Similarly, many of us run as a form of therapy and it might be kind of nice to know just what is helping you process those issues.

Here's more on 2012: The Life of the Mind.