Your mileage may vary

Today's workout: Rest day

Despite my meticulous efforts to capture my running metrics, I'm realizing that my perception of my overall performance differs from the hard facts. When people ask me about it I usually say I run 9:00 miles. I can run faster than that, but I don't. In truth, I only hit 8:00-something paces a few times a month and most of the time I average between 9:10-9:30/mile. Yesterday, after uploading my latest run into Garmin Connect, I noticed that my average monthly distance is 65 miles. This confused me because, when asked, I usually say I run 20 miles a week. I think part of that delusion comes from when I used MapMyRun to record my metrics and included the distance measurement from my elliptical sessions. In fact, I ran less monthly distance a year ago than today because I was limiting my morning weekday runs to no more than 20 minutes.

In order to really reach the 20 mile per week level I will need to average closer to 3 miles per day during the week (less one rest day and one cross training day) and 10 miles over the weekend. The gating factor is time, not conditioning. However, if I really could average 9:00 per mile I would definitely compile more distance in the same amount of time.