Yes, I’m a little behind, but I need to go ahead and recap how my running went in January so that I can then recap how it went in February so that I can then be caught up. Understand? Great.
After seeing how my running totals have progressed over the last 3 years, I decided that my goal for 2011 would be to run 2,000 miles, which I then broke down into 12 parts so I’d have some kind of monthly goal to shoot for. That number is 165 (I know that’s 20 short, but I can make that up towards the end of the year easily). Of course, running is rarely that simple – monthly mileage fluctuates depending on what you’re training for, so there will be months that are a bit higher or lower, but at least I have a target.
For reference, my January totals in past years were 84 and 57 (2009 and 2010), so this was going to be quite a bump up in early year mileage, and for that reason alone I wasn’t upset that I missed the 165 target. Not by much, but I came up a little short with 152, which is still almost double my best January.
Two things of note happened in January:
- I started doing weekly tempo runs. A much better and faster member of an online running community mentioned that adding these to my routine would really help my race times, and so I figured it was worth a shot. Turns out he was right. My “Tuesday tempos” turned out results like 4 miles @ 7:55 pace, 4.5 miles @ 8:17, and 4 miles @ 8:11.
- I PR’ed my first 8k. I know, it was going to be a PR anyway because it was my first, but I ran it perfectly. I had a target goal and beat it by almost a minute. This was the first race that put my tempo runs to the test, and it felt great to “pass” it. My goal was 40:00 and I finished in 39:04. You can read about it here if you’re really bored.
Rewind stats:
- Total miles: 152.0
- Average per week: 38.0
- Races: 1
- New records: 8k (39:04)
- Consecutive triple-digit months: 11
