One more year went by and the blog continued its existence. As you know by now, the blog took birth once I had read the book by A. Juilland "Rethinking Track and Field" which gave me the idea to write about things that could (should?) change in the way we are doing athletics. Things that could make competitions more interesting and funnier. (And I must admit that Juilland's title was great, so I did not hesitate to steal it).
Writing the articles for the blog takes time (and requires inspiration) so I decided to pace myself and try to publish regularly without overdoing it. And also, because, I must at all costs avoid readers' burnout. Typically I set myself a lower limit of articles to publish in a year at around 35-40 (roughly three per month). Usually I manage to do better than this. The one thing I cannot control are the views I get. They are, up to a certain point unpredictable, but not totally. This year for instance I obtained a jump of several hundred views of my article "Understanding the Paralympics" just when the Paralympic Games were starting in Paris.
But to tell the truth when one looks at the history of views it is not clear what is really happening.
Where do those peaks come from? While there was definitely some correlation of this year's increased views with the Olympics I am not sure that would explain everything. (It would be fun if Google trained its LLM model on my blog. I asked Gemini what happened in the women's 800 m in the Amsterdam 1928 Olympics and, alas, got a non-committal answer. So much for the hope of the blog becoming famous through AI). Be that as it may, the blog is inching towards 300 k views, for 450 published articles. Of course, not all articles get the same number of views. Some like "The javelin controversy" or "Pole vault: before and after" are highly attractive. Others have to contend themselves with just a handful.
The question I ask myself every year is where do we go from here? And at this point I cannot resist the temptation of telling a joke involving detective Monk. If you haven't seen the tv series involving the obsessive detective I recommend that you do it. In one episode Monk (who insists that the count of everything should be a multiple of 10 or of 100) sees somebody doing chin-ups on a horizontal bar and counting 95, 96, 97, reaching 98 and then, with great difficulty, 99 at which point Monk starts encouraging him for one more. Indeed he manages the 100th and surpassing himself we does one more reaching 101. Monk looks seriously at him and says: "now you must go to 200". I feel like being in the same situation. Ten years was a good point to stop. Having gone past that milestone, I can only continue. So, onwards to the 12th year.
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