Greatist: 50 Bloggers Making a Difference in Fitness, Health, and Happiness

I started this blog 4 years ago with no knowledge of how to design a website, no Twitter or Facebook account, and a fear of posting anything with my name attached to it (I started writing anonymously!). Since then, however, I’ve come to feel like this blog is my second home, albeit a virtual one. I’ve met a great number of awesome people from all over the world through this site, and it has opened up opportunities for me that I could never have imagined just a few short years ago. Writing this blog has quite literally changed my life.

Given the important place that this site holds in my life, it is extremely rewarding to see the work I put in here recognized as important in some way. I’ve been fortunate to have been recognized as a top running blog by Competitor Magazine and Sneaker Report, a top fitness blog by Outside Online, and most recently one of 50 blogs making a difference in fitness, health, and happiness by Greatist.

In this post I wanted to encourage you to take a look at the list Greatist put together. What I particularly like about their list is that they focused on sites primarily written and managed by a single person (or pairs of authors). What this means as that the success of these sites is largely the result of a tremendous amount of hard work put forth by a an individual who is extremely passionate about the topic that they focus on. There are some well-known names on the list, but many of the authors probably started a lot like me – in relative obscurity. It probably took a year of consistent posting before I had any kind of sizable readership, another six months after that before the income generated from the site was more than a few dollars per day, and three full years before the possibility of doing this full-time entered my mind. You have to be willing to persevere to build a successful website. You have to be able to endure through a long period of productivity with little apparent return. But if you continue to plug away, good things can happen. Blogging isn’t easy, but it can be very rewarding, and the bloggers on the list are great examples of this.

I’m honored to be among great company in this list, and was happy to see fellow run blogging friends like Jason Fitzgerald of Strength Running and Matt Frazier of No Meat Athlete included. Both Jason and Matt are testaments to what one can achieve when you put the full force of your effort into a website. Like me, both have followed their websites into full-time careers revolving around writing and web-based running content. I would imagine that many others on this list have followed a similar path, please take a moment to check them out!