Fraser Darcy

Well it’s not often that I post a blog midweek and judging by your ability to read the title you’ve probably already put two and two together as to why. This is the third year in a row I’ve been managing this blog and following a tradition I started last year, it’s time to recap what the experience has been like.

First, to summarise the initial two years and condense what I wrote about it in ‘Two years of the blog and Airbnb’ here’s a quick recap:

• I did some freelance outdoor guiding with adults who booked through my website. Then I stopped doing that because it was too much hassle. It was a good thing to try though.
• I continued to improve my running and started writing more race reports and training updates. I was happy doing this with no real goal in mind of what to do with the blog.
• I had enjoyed the opportunities that have opened up for my writing with Snowys and The Blue Line.
• I said to ‘watch this space’ about earning money through coaching income and Airbnb.
• I was still happy about using Airbnb to generate an experience for me, not necessarily generate money for me.
• I proposed a couple of goals for the next year as well. They were:
  • To profile a few people and share it on my blog. It would be interesting to learn from other people’s successes and mistakes as I have from my own and share that with people, plus it would also help drive more traffic to my site.
  • To share my blog at least once a month to see if I can actually make any money from it.
  • To increase the quality of it.
  • To either stop doing Airbnb, keep doing it or build a seperate building altogether.

Those last few goals are probably a good place to start with for my reflection on three years on maintaining the blog.

I never bothered with profiling anyone else. I kind of forgot about this goal until I reread it and I still do like the idea but the tricky thing is that a venture like that takes time to get it right. Given I like to prioritise my time on things that I do, sacrificing some of that time to spend on putting together a blog on someone else I’m not sure will have a great benefit of return for me and the purposes of this blog. Perhaps if I went through an injury period again, or if I just had standard training weeks in a row and needed to change things up then I could add in some extra content. But then finding people willing to interview would also be a challenge. Plenty of food for thought on this one. If any long time subscribers would like to feature as a blog post that would be a good starting point probably as they know the style of this website and would hopefully be comfortable in being put on the internet. *So that’s a subtle hint that if anyone reading this wants to be the centre of attention for five minutes, let me know. If I still like the idea when you email me then I’ll have a think about it.*

Sharing my blog more. I don’t do this enough either. I did add a link every now and then in the past year to a photo upload on my Instagram story. It’s pretty easy to do and does increase the traffic, plus reminds people I’m still tapping away here. The reason I don’t do it regularly is because my baseline opinion is if you want to read what I write, you’re probably already subscribed or checking on my website periodically. But I guess, that opinion doesn’t fit the moments that I also just reshare pictures of my running on Instagram too without any blog links. If people wanted to see pictures of me running, they could just come here? But I shove it down their throats on Instagram anyway? So I guess, from now on I should share the blog a bit more anytime I share something on Instagram. Just do it for a month or so and see what happens.

Increase the quality of it. This is hard to measure and I guess is why I like writing the blog. Most other things in my life have a metric that I can aim for. I know I’m running well or coaching well if certain parameters are hit. With writing the blog I don’t really have those same stats and rather just intrinsically know whether I’m happy or not with my work. I feel like over the past 12 months I’ve certainly found my routine with the blog and can easily punch out a weekly review, and enjoy the process of doing so, within 1.5hrs. Do I measure the increase in quality of these recaps in the vocabulary I use? My sentence structure? The view count? Maybe? Does it really matter for something that is just a passion/creative project of mine? No! So having not followed through with my first two goals I am happy to say I have met this goal as I am still happy enough to write the blog and am becoming more and more efficient with it. My view counts are also going up for what it’s worth.

Finally, the Airbnb game. It wasn’t long after I published my ‘Two years of the blog and Airbnb’ post that I ended up killing it off over March/April. I had started to pursue coaching with RunAsOne and didn’t want to be juggling too many balls with Airbnb and getting to running commitments. I did go through a month or two watching a lot of YouTube videos about building a tiny home and dreamt about doing that with my spare time between online coaching commitments but in the end realised that it would be a lot of hassle and take my focus away from my own running and now coaching. Instead, what ended up happening was that as my coaching commitments increased with RunAsOne and I ended up spending more time in Adelaide I moved onto the next phase of home ownership. Becoming a landlord. Yes, I have moved from being in the short-term rental market to the long-term rental market. My house is now rented out in Quorn and I enjoyed the process of organising that and look forward to seeing how it all pans out over the course of the next 11 months (I’m already 1 month into it). If it works and is hassle free, great. If I can keep my Quorn house and still get into the Adelaide property market at some point in the future, even better. How that all pans out is too far into the crystal ball.

Even though I’ve reflected on those goals, there are still a few gaps in the last 12 months of what managing this blog has been about. The first one is the change in career from pool lifeguard/teacher/outdoor ed instructor to part time running coach. At the time of writing twelve months ago, I wasn’t a coach and put in a big paragraph about how I wanted to see where that led me. It ended up working pretty well for me having become a major part of RunAsOne, immersing myself in the wider running community of SA, creating a lot more running friends and getting to several different interstate running events. The events that have transpired over the past 12 months have certainly exceeded my expectations for my first year as a coach which is great. Perhaps exceeding those expectations balances out the fact I never got around to sharing my blog or doing more things with it. Even with exceeding expectations as a coach I am also happy to reflect on the fact that my own running has improved from the things I have learnt from becoming a coach and I have not lost the spirit of independence in my running as I ruminated about twelve months ago. There was a brief few weeks last year where I did recognise that maybe I needed to keep a few things in my running to remain sane but I never progressed far enough down the ‘systematic’ world of running that I couldn’t escape back to some fundamental Fraser-traits. I now have a good balance of doing things with the group and then still going about things my own way on my own journey as a runner and coach.

Okay, having reflected now on the last twelve months from a big picture perspective, a few numbers to share that I am proud of and to help with when I complete this exercise in twelve months time again (and to measure how much sharing the blog actually makes a difference):

• Number of subscribers: 93. My initial goal 3 years ago was 50-100 so we’re almost finally exceeding my initial goal. This time last year I had 61 subscribers.
• Anywhere from 1600-2000 views per month across the last 6-7 months. This time last year I was hitting 600-700 and got it up to 1000-1400 by August. Sydney Mara/September was a big month at 2000 and then November/injured month was back to 1000 for the month so there are ups and downs. In yearly totals, 1st year was 5,300 views, 10,800 views for the 2nd year and 14,800 views for the third year. The visitors have also increased about a thousand per year to hit 3,700 last year. These stats are in the images below for full disclosure. I don’t really pay attention to these stats each month NOR do I ever write to increase the SEO of my blogs because it’s never been about chasing views for me. As you can tell from forgetting to share it. If I continue to write too much about how I don’t care about the views it begins to sound a bit like I’m over doing the whole ‘look at me, I have no ego and don’t care about how many people like my things’ rah rah. Come off it Fraser, everyone likes a good stroke of the ego and these numbers are exactly that. I just don’t obsess about them is all I’m saying (or at least sounding like I’m trying to tell myself…).

Where do I hope the next twelve months of the blog leads me?

I never really speak about my long term goals, whether they are running or life related, on this website in an explicit form but you can probably work out for yourself what I will be focusing on in the next twelve months (running, coaching etc.). With that perspective and keeping in mind the focus of this blog is about the blog itself, I hope at the end of the next twelve months I am:

• Still producing weekly recaps and enjoying doing so.
• Have produced a few other interesting pieces of writing about either other people or just interesting things when I have had free time.
• Have continued to grow my subscribers and view counts. There is no real potential in the numbers I’m reaching at the moment to warrant putting ads on this page but if I did happen to link my blog content with my coaching and personal running success it does make it an attractive platform to help sponsors get involved. They could be sponsors in the old fashioned sense of companies looking to help out because they like the journey I’m on or they could be sponsors in the new fashioned sense of people who read this wanting to purchase a collection of blogs in the form of a book for $5 or something. I’m not someone who’s subscribed for a fee to something like a podcast myself but I have purchased a bunch of magazines and books over the years as a one-off thing and if I was ever going to go down that path, that’s the style I’d opt for. Some sort of, hey, I’m going to do this marathon overseas or this race, be great to know if people are interested in a longer form book or whatever recounting the thing afterwards. But give me $5 to make sure I know it’s worth my time etc. Otherwise I’d just probably stick to what I have done for the last three years.

Whether the blog continues past a fourth year I don’t know. When I moved to Quorn three years ago and started taking my running seriously I always had this idea that after four years I would assess what level I got to and whether I was still enjoying it or whether I was just doing it because that’s what my lifestyle was and I had forgotten to actually think about whether it still made me happy. The four year thing was because I did a four year uni degree and re-assessed what life was like after that and most major sporting events are also held every four years so it seemed like a nice little timeline. Plus, most athletes need three to four years of consistent dedicated training to build a base before they start getting the results they are capable of. So, who knows, the next twelve months could be the last twelve months of the blog and running/coaching if I get to the end and realise my life’s moving in another direction. I might get back into climbing again?! Or Skiing? Or it could be the start of another four years of running! Only way to know is to stay subscribed I guess…

Thanks for reading!