80 Mile Month

Wow, what a rewarding month. For the first time ever I logged 80 miles in a single month. My previous high for mileage was 63 in the months leading up to my Half-Marathon. Below is my graph of running since I started keeping a log in late August.




Some interesting things you can see in the graph is that my long runs (I define a long run as anything over a 10k or 6.2 miles) have become less of a component of my monthly mileage and my daily runs a larger part. In graph form my falling off the apple cart after my Half-Marathon is quite obvious as well. The slightly lower mileage in November is because I didn’t run the rest of the month following the Nov 22 Race. I then roughly double my mileage each month January through April (10, 22, 42, and 80). Don’t expect the same doubling for May. My goal, which by stating publicly I am giving myself accountability, is 100 miles for May.

In April I ran on 19 of the 30 days during the month. If you discount the 4 Sundays, I missed 7 actual running days and never more that 2 days in a given week. In hindsight I should have missed a few more days (only took 1 day off for a back pain I fought for a week and I ran a 5 miler the same day I donated blood – NOT RECOMMENDED) but at the same time I felt good about pushing through some things I would have used as excuses in the past.

If you do the math you will see that I averaged just over 4 miles per day that I ran. So, I can make the additional 20 miles of my goal in 1 of three ways. 1) If I miss 5 less days during the month that will give me the extra 20, 2) Since there are 5 Saturdays in May, hopefully I will get more long runs in, 3) I can drop some of the shorter 3 and 3.2 mile neighborhood loops from my morning rotation and only do the 3.4 mile and up loops, my average morning run lengths will increase. My guess is that to reach the 100 mile mark it will have to be a combination of all three of these. Wish me luck.

As for my weight loss, because I know you all are just SO interested, I think I am finally starting to break my plateau. For my run last November I got as low as 198. When I stopped running I actually drifted a little lower down to about 196.5 as I think I lost some muscle mass. By the end of January I was back over 200, by February 202. In March I started running again with some regularity and what happened – up to 204 by my birthday (I did visit and "enjoy" France during that time). For the bulk of April I held almost a constant 202-201 and was getting quite frustrated that I was putting in 20 mile weeks and not seeing any results. You can only tell yourself that muscle weighs more than fat so much! In the last week I have finally seen the scale dip under 200 and this morning’s 198.4 was the best I’ve seen since January. Maybe the fat to muscle conversion is done now and I can resume my march to 183… Once again, wish me luck. Just struck me, can you call an 80-100 mile month "luck"? Maybe I should switch to something like wish me strength/success/perseverance… or is that what "luck" connotes?