2018 Cleveland Marathon: No more fun run marathons!

fun run marathons finisher's medal

“Respect the distance.” Probably the first thing that comes to mind while thinking about today’s marathon. Yeah, I never doubted finishing (although a half may have been better, overall, today), but if I don’t want to race the marathon, I don’t take the training, preparation, or race seriously. No more fun run marathons! For the second year in a row, I got an entry via FMDSA (an Altra ambassador had a cousin running [operating] that charity, and they looked for runners). I probably would never pick the Cleveland Marathon as a goal race because of the time of year (the …

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Wikipedia: Clickbait for Learners

wikipedia christian lautenschleger

The best times to sit down to look up something on Wikipedia are early morning and late night, right? I mean, who wouldn’t want to spend the whole day researching something more esoteric than grad school research or losing sleep over the causes of the proliferation of smart phones in elementary schools (I made that one up, but it probably exists). Some people clickbait Forbes, HuffPo, or BuzzFeed, others resort to Wikipedia. You know you’re having a good Wikipedia session when you don’t even know how you got to the page you’re on. You have to look at your recent …

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Word count obsession: stop it!

topsailislandsunset word count christian lautenschleger

For the love of all things sacred, please stop with the word count obsession while writing blog posts! Obsessing leads to poorly-written blogs post. Write everything that needs to be written and no more. Word count may contribute to better SEO, but poorly written posts won’t have people returning, which is probably what we want. A rule of thumb is blog posts between 300-600 words for search engines. Fewer words mean we didn’t write enough to really contribute to a topic. More words can mean we really went into depth or wrote more words for the sake of more words. …

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Lighting: Eye-Opening into the world of photography

In an effort to increase my value for photography and a way to make money during the winter months in Ohio, I decided to invest in a lighting system for my Nikon. I’ve by-and-large been a natural light photographer up until this point, but thought that I needed to add lights. Maybe just because. I’ve shot for a newspaper and have a good camera and host of lenses, but thought I’d grab a speedlight and some softboxes for my new studio. Wow, I had no idea I missed so much with photography until I (re)discovered lighting. With natural light you …

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