Hi Readers, Happy New Year!! I hope you had a wonderful holidays. I haven’t posted in a long time, first because of the knee injury that made it impossible to train for the Marathon I was planning to run on December and after that, when it was healed, all the other races of the year were sold out, so I was low on motivation to run much without upcoming races, and with motivation to run being low, my motivation to write was even lower… sorry.

But something else happened that kept me away from blogging, it has a bit more to do with my personal life and with the situation where I live. I don’t normally talk about these things on the blog but I feel that if I don’t do it now I wont be able to close the chapter and start the new year as I should. Also, I would like to share with you how things are somewhere else in the world. So here it goes:

I was born on the US, but most of my family lives in Venezuela (South America) and I’ve been here most of my life. It’s a beautiful country with wonderful people (and absolutely perfect weather the whole year), but sadly on the last few years we’ve been on a constant political turmoil. Each day the government is slipping farther away from a democracy and we are getting closer to being under a dictatorship (or maybe we already are). My family’s first income is a ranch my grandfather bought 30 years ago. One of my uncle’s studied agronomy so my grandfather bought it as a family business he could work in, it’s the only place where my uncle has worked in, and it also helps support all of our family.

Almost six weeks ago the government went to my uncle and said that they were taking the ranch from us, that we had 8 days to get out and that we couldn’t take anything from it. They are claiming they are taking it to ‘recover it’, to ‘give it back to the people’, because according to them the land is not ours, they say that we stole it! Even when we have the documents of property dating back from 1817, when the government back then sold the land to some dude, and that dude to someone else, and that one to someone else… until my grandfather bought it.

They claim other reasons, I wont (and can’t) get into details here, but the end of it is that they are stealing it from us. It’s a productive ranch that makes good money and it’s in great conditions, so they want it for them. We are not the first ones going through something like this, we have talked with lawyers and they say all this is completely illegal, but where do you go when it’s your own government the one that’s stealing from you? In the end there’s absolutely nothing we can do, we just have been trying to stall the process so we can save as much as we can, try to at least sell the animals and the machinery in there, because we know they are taking the land and not giving us anything in exchange.

So as you can guess, this has been keeping me with very little motivation, it’s the work of a lifetime that’s being taken from us. All my family’s savings are invested there, my uncle has been working there for 30 years, he has a family to support too, and we are being left with nothing…

That said, I guess you can understand why I’ve been away from blogland lately. But today is the first day of a new year, that means a new running season is about to start and running is one of the things that makes me happy. So I’m going to start running with a purpose again, and since I’m running, I will have more to blog about so expect to see more of me around here (and around your blogs too).

I still haven’t planned this season, don’t know what races I want to run or what I want my goals to be. I am going on vacations (plane leaves in 5 hours!) to Vegas and then on a Cruise for a week. It’s a trip we planned since January last year and already payed for everything, so no reason not to go. I’m hoping that when I come back my head will be clearer and I will have a plan for this running season. So until then.

Happy New Year and Happy running everyone!