Pick up the phone

From another site everyone should read, even if they don’t think they’re geeks: Round 2: Dial Tone:

You can regard the history of the computer industry as pushing “dial tone” further and further up the stack. As Crichton noted, the rotary dial telephone was the first computer that allowed direct interaction between humans and computers. The personal computer pushed customer self service up the stack to programming, data processing, and eventually applications such as word processing and spreadsheets.

New applications often start out requiring operators, but eventually move towards dial-tone. For example, you can look at blogging as the “dial tone” equivalent of creating a web site. For ordinary folks (not most of my readers, but non-technical folks), creating a web site was something that required an operator. You went to a web design shop or an ISP and had them do it for you. The blogging revolution, the wiki revolution, the MySpace revolution, the CyWorld revolution, are really about providing a kind of self-service dial-tone for creating a web presence and community.

You can apply this to running, too. Fitness used to be something the rich did, as they were the only ones with leisure time. Then, it was the folks with athletic talent and access to limited facilities and training.

With the internet, we’ve all got access to the motivation and techniques of the greats. Want to run a marathon? Google it, pick a training plan, and plug into a support group.

DIY fitness. Nothing better.