Why do I keep doing this?

There is no money in blogging.

I am very aware of this fact. No brand has ever asked to sponsor a blog post or paid for the advertising on its fringes. Yet for the past decade I have sporadically, yet passionately, written on this little quiet corner of an internet overcrowded by its own loudness.

I carry on as if I’ve missed the memo that blogging died somewhere around the time Instagram and TikTok vied for your attention. It’s not even particularly sensible to keep at it. The algorithms don’t care about blogs. People scroll now; they don’t read. But still, here I am, tapping away at keys while my coffee goes cold.

Why? To explain that I have to take you back to the start.

Before this was The Morning Coffee Run it was a blog called Coffee and Countries, I know I am a painful coffee hipster. It was created after I left university with a 2:2 which meant little hope of making it in the career I had dreamed of: journalism. I needed a creative output but also somewhere to show someone, anyone, that I could string sentences together to encapsulate emotions or news. It documented my life in India as I worked out there as a reporter and editor, my life living in London as I made my first foray into working in the social media space and it documented the first few runs as I tried and failed to be like my friends long before I actually became a runner. It was and still is my real creative outlet. My way of documenting and deciphering my life as it unfurls.

Then 2015 rolled in like a storm. I experienced grief and heartbreak in quick succession and the mental strength that I had, turned to dust in the rain and blew away in the wind. It was during that worst period of my life that I picked up a pair of trainers and went out for a run. That run would save my life and lead to The Morning Coffee Run but also to the life I now have both personally and professionally. As Instagram began I posted on there as a way to direct people to this blog as I started to document my running journey on the newly re-named site. Slowly and effortlessly I began to post on there more and on here less, until one day it had been two months since my last post. I then started working in the running industry and the desire to write about it dwindled.

There have always been times where I get a flurry of desire to write again, a few posts would happen and then life would get in the way again. But I keep coming back to it because I love the written word and because this little corner of the internet has always been mine.

When I started writing, it was never about followers, brand deals, or clicks. It was about the need to make sense of things. Running gave me a way to move through the fog, but writing gave me a way to understand it. I could lace up my shoes, go out for ten miles, and come back with thoughts untangled just enough to spill them onto a page. Some posts were good, some were terrible, and some were just therapy disguised as storytelling.

And people read them. Not thousands, not even hundreds some days, but someone. Someone sitting at their own kitchen table, coffee in hand, feeling that same quiet ache of being human. That’s the thing about words: they don’t need to go viral to matter. They just need to land somewhere.

Blogging, for me, is the long run of the creative world. It’s not flashy. It’s not fast. But it’s steady. It asks you to show up when no one is watching, to keep going when you’re not sure where the finish line is. It forces me to slow down and in doing so comprehend and process things in a way no other medium can.

It’s not about being the loudest voice in the room; it’s about being the one who stays, even when the crowd has moved on to something else. I know I will still be here stringing sentences and miles together into tales for someone, anyone, to read, hopefully with a coffee in hand.

There may be no money in doing this, but there is so a lot of joy.