Running year in review

Today finished my year in running. I did a very easy 5K today.

I was not planning to run today, but as an unmedicated ADDer, I was needing something to bring life back into focus. I have found over the last 2 years of being an exerciser that doing something physical seems to help me not feel as though my life is falling apart at the seams. I have not been to exercise class in two weeks and took the last week off from running. I have had an impending feeling of my house of cards about to come crashing down.

The run must have helped. The feeling is gone and though I left all of my notes at home for my three sermons today, I was able to make my way through them and solidify my strongly held belief that preparation is worthless. 🙂

I started casually running in December of last year. I did probably 3 runs of about 30 minutes each. I did not know at the time that you are not supposed to run that long when you start out. You should ease your way into running. So my first runs were about 3 miles long with long runs up to 6 miles. My regular running started in January when my brother mentioned that he was running a half marathon in May. I decided to train with him, even though we live in different countries.

Though I could figure out how many days this year I have been running and, on average, how many miles per run I have done, I will just sum up with some highlights.

    Total mileage for the month of December: 41.1 miles (kinda low, but I have plenty of good excuses)
    Total mileage for the year of 2006: 582 miles

Year mileage is a PR since this is my first year to run. That is a good start. Adam at Burning 20 mentioned in a recent episode that he is going to run 1000 miles for the year of 2007. I have yet to set a firm number, but I would think that 1000 miles would be about where I should be looking. That is just under 20 miles a week. For many weeks I averaged 17 miles a week. So pushing it up to 20 would not be that much more. I will have to think on that for a while.

I ran in 2 pairs of shoes. The first was my everyday shoes which were New Balance 435. I put 300 running miles on them. (Who knows how many non-running miles they had). I was not convinced that they were worn out until I ran a few days in my new shoes and tried the old ones again. I was instantly convinced. The new pair are Nike Air Copius. They have 282 miles on them. I would like to get another pair to start running in while these have some mileage on them. But, buying shoes here is almost an impossibility. They just don’t make them big enough in this country. And then the price…

I started the year with my first road race being an 8K at 49:42 for a pace of 9:56 per mile. My most recent race was a 5K at 27:29 for a pace of 8:38 per mile. I ran 2 half marathons this year. Both of them are what I call a personal race. I ran alone, but one was while my brother was running the Indy Mini half. The other was the Phedippidations World Wide Half marathon.

My endurance has increased tremendously. My speed has as well. A casual run for me now is under 10 minutes per mile where that used to be my race pace.

I am excited to see what this next year will bring. I am going to see what I can do to get my 5K time down. I don’t know if it is possible to improve this quickly, but I am going to make an effort to get to around a 22 minute 5K. That will be a pace of 7:04 per mile. That is a big jump, but I think with some focused speed sessions I can get really close. Currently I am not even running a single mile at that pace, but I have not given an honest effort of getting the mile time down.

Let’s see what this next year in running will bring.

One thought on “Running year in review”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.