800 Miles in a Wimper

Not exactly what I had planned for my 800th mile for the year, but I'll take it. Walking the girls to school this morning I clicked over 800 mile mark. No fireworks, no really good story, shoot Cade just wanted to get home so he could go pee. Still I'm happy that I reached this goal this year.

Since the year is coming to a close, I've come up with my goals for next year. Without further ado:

1. Run my first half marathon on Memorial Day. Sub 2:15:00 race goal.
2. Run a 10k in March - Sub 60:00 min race goal.
3. Run/Cycle/Walk 900 miles - stretch goal 1000 miles.
4. Run a 5k race on 4th of July - sub 28:00 min race goal.
5. Consecutive day streak - 25 days.
6. Run a 'long run' of 10+ miles.
7. Run/Cycle/Walk 120 miles in one month.
8. Become much more consistent overall - (example: every month total mileage ie 40+) I don't want to have such wild swings off my average.
9. Get my weight below 185.

All of these would be PB's except #8 since I can't really track that.

There's a few other things I'm eyeing, like a few more races, and maybe even another half sometime next year but beyond what I'm listing, I think I should be good for the upcoming year. I just want to run injury free and enjoy myself, but at the same time push myself a little more this upcoming year and see if my mile times start coming down. This is my last year in the under 40 group so I want to make it count.

The other night I took Bogey out and we did 6.8 miles pretty easily. I actually ran up a few hills that I couldn't make it up earlier in the year. If fact one hill at the 6 mile mark I've never run up until this run, ad even though it hurt I still made it up with extra in my legs. So I'll take that as a win this week. Overall my pace was 10:05 per mile which was right in the middle of my target pace for a long run. Afterwards I could feel my legs were tired but not too bad. The following day (yesterday) I was sore but nothing I couldn't handle. I'm thinking sometime next week I'm going to shoot for a 8 mile distance for a PB to close out the year. That with my upcoming attempt at a 5k PB on my birthday should close out a good year.

Looking back, I didn't quite progress like I wanted to, but really it's tough when I haven't been consistent like I wanted. Below is a graph out of my log book - it's my overall monthly mileage for the last 24 months. You can see what I'm talking about regarding consistency.



Really What I'd like to see is me 'beating' the mileage for the month that is 'dropping' off this chart. This will begin to start in March of next year. Until then I want to log over 40 miles in Jan and Feb to try to keep my average up. I'll post this again in July to show my progress. I'm putting stock into this metric for the upcoming year because I believe that if this graph does continue to climb my overall times will decrease. In fact I think I'll be in a better position (stronger) to start more tempo runs this upcoming year. If you notice the overall percentage of my tempo runs are almost nil. I did that on purpose because I wanted to spend the last two years building a solid foundation, lose weight, and make running a part of my life again. 2010 has always been my goal year in regards to distance and speed. I'll just have to see how it plays out.

Another graph I wanted to share that I look at quite a bit recently is my overall time spent running/walking/cycling - see below:



My goal here is to really have the whole 30 days over 1:00:00 or 30 hours of workout time for the month. Once again consistency this upcoming year is going to be important to me. I'll post this again in July for comparison.

Switching gears I wanted to once again take time to say Hello and Welcome to my new readers, and everyone who has started following me from FB. Thanks for taking the time and reading what I have to say. As long as I get more readers I'll continue to write about my progress - I might take time off here and there but I'll always be around. I'm starting to see quite a few more hits on this site which means to me that what I'm writing is either helpful, funny, or at least interesting. Thanks!

Keep Steppin'
Bob