Monday Mario

Mr. Grumpy Face

I have still not made-up for my missed 16 miler this past Friday. I ran 5 miles today and saw the blue sky for the first time in days. Yay! I'm debating getting the long run done tomorrow or just holding off until Friday. Originally I had planned for this to be a cut-back week because my parents are going to be in town visiting. Figured I wouldn't keep them waiting three hours while I ran loops. So if I can do it tomorrow before they arrive I'll just do 8 or so on Friday. Otherwise I'm shooting for 8 tomorrow and may or may not run long on Friday.

I've been keeping the mileage up this month for two reasons. One, I want to keep a good base up before I start triathlon/half marathon PR/50K training next month (much more on this later). Two, I set a goal of 1500 miles for 2008. I regret the mileage goal. I use an excel spreadsheet running log I downloaded a few years ago. It's great. It's got a lot of fancy tables I don't know how to read and never use, but it also tracks a lot of things to which I pay attention. One of the things it can do is tell you exactly how many miles you are either behind or ahead for a mileage goal for the year.

In 2007 I broke 1000 miles for the first time. That was even with a month I only ran 16 miles! So I thought 1500 would be reasonable if I kept the running constant the whole year. As of today I am 38.7 miles behind my goal for the year. I saw that number creep up to 60 and have been widdling away at it. Sprained ankles forced me to cut back heavily more than a few weeks this year and I've been playing catch-up ever since.

I don't think I'll ever set another mileage goal. I find myself padding my mileage and less willing to really cut back when I need to. I'm less willing to forgo a running day for things like biking (and soon swimming). I don't mind this being the "Year of Run" but next year I think I'd like to not feel guilty when I diversify. And yes, I am too pigheaded to abandon it at this point. I'm not sure if I'll catch up, but I'm still going to try. When I get to December 30th and am more than a marathon away from my goal I will concede.