Writing consistently on this blog has not been my strong suit since the desire stirred within. As such, I've chosen the next topic as something less along the lines of something I hope would be useful to others and something that I am just curious about myself: my running stats over the last decade.
I've been tracking my mileage daily since the end of my junior season of Track & Field. I was recovering from a femoral stress fracture, and needed to pay attention to the patterns of mileage that I was allowing myself to run. I had been training 6 days a week on the elliptical for four months, and was getting truly sick of spinning in place in a cage inside a high school gymnasium. From before that time, I have my aggregate mileage as listed in my summer running logs and on the Palatine Cross Country website, and a rough, low-ball estimation of my mileage from my 5-7 days a week running on the 1/10 mile track at the local YMCA through 8th grade and freshman year.
The statistics that I track on my runs: total days run over some time span, miles per run, miles per day, miles per week and, my favorite measuring tool as far as distance goes, the 4 week moving average. I am a firm believer that the 4 week moving average is the best indicator of overall mileage. It allows for a better way to judge increasing mileage relative to total intensity, and at least for me mollifies the mental anguish of missing a day of running (it only harms the 4-week total by 1/4 the mileage!). Even if you are a die-hard user of the weekly mileage total, I highly encourage you to incorporate some sort of a running average into tracking your progress.
Without further ado, the numbers...
Prior to May 2004: before the femoral stress fracture I ran 3730 miles (~4.5 years).
May 2004 - August 2005 (Senior year of high school): 1702 miles with a total of 4 weeks of pure rest
August 2005- January 2009 (college through 2nd semester senior year of college): 2000 miles, only running Sep-Dec 2005, April-Dec 2006, and April-August 2007.
Total prior to 2009: 7432 miles.
As of January 1 2009, I started running again daily and have kept that up through the marathon each year. I've also been keeping more detailed statistics and analysis since my goal has been the same each year: finish the Chicago marathon. In 2009, I ran every single day between the 1st of January and the marathon. I do not plan on repeating that feat where marathon training is involved, as the occasional rest day does wonders for the body. However, I was in good shape from keeping up the uninterrupted schedule. I ran 3:45 in my marathon debut in brisk mid-30s weather. (287 runs, 1216.6 miles before, 30 runs, 101.3 miles after)
In 2010, I was sidelined for a week in late March by a cyst in my lower back that needed excising, and ran into some hamstring trouble the weeks before the marathon. Between that and the mid-80s weather, I crashed from a 1:44 half to a 4:14 total, walking most of the last 7 miles. (282 runs, 1279.9 miles before, 6 runs, 23.5 miles after)
So far in 2011, I've run 218 times for a total of 976.3 miles. I ran lower mileage that both 2009 and 2010 in February - May as I worked on changing my foot-strike a bit, but have been putting in consistently higher mileage weeks with the exception of my European vacation the remainder of the summer. With the exception of some current tightness in the shins I've been feeling fairly good, so hopefully it bodes well for a good marathon clocking this year.
Overall, my running in the last decade of my life comes out to approximately 10935 miles.
