Building up the monthly miles

On the comeback trail

Happy almost Memorial Day. It finally feels like summer and I've been doing my best to get out for runs early to beat the heat. I did that today and was rewarded with a cool and comfortable 66° temp. I wore a mid-weight shirt and shorts and wished I went with a lighter top by the end. I recently read that a worn heel is not a good reason to discard a running shoe because, "to patch such a heel prevents proper adaptation of the shoe to the runner’s particular heel strike pattern." That inspired me to pull out my well worn Kinvara 5s for today's run.

One of my goals for my post-work life was a return to running 18 miles per week. When I was doing 2.5 mile runs on weekdays and 7-8 miles over the weekend, I averaged about 75 miles per month. Over the past five years, my monthly average has steadily declined. Now that I'm running almost every day, I'm looking to build back to the 70+ mile target. A look back over the last 12 months shows an embarrassing monthly average of 30 miles with some pathetically low totals Jan-March.

The highest monthly total I've reached since June 2018 was 45.9. Now that I'm running six days a week, I was expecting to easily exceed that high point. A quick check on Garmin Connect made me think it would come down to the wire for May whether I would hit a new monthly high. When I went out on Saturday morning, my May monthly total was 40.8 miles. I was thinking I'd need to cover 5.1 miles before Monday.

We were invited to brunch yesterday and I was pressed for time, so I finished up after covering 3.2 miles. That left me thinking that I still needed 2.2 miles to reach my highest monthly total in a year. I beat that easily, and when I uploaded my final May runs to Garmin I realized that May doesn't end on the 26th. I actually have until next Saturday to build on that total. My new goal for May is 60 miles, double my 12 month cumulative average. 60 miles a month is a big improvement, but it's still less than 14 miles a week.

I will be aiming for 70 miles in June which would get me to almost to 90% of my target (18 miles per week). That means another 2.3 miles per week, either added to my shorter daily runs or as a step toward returning to long weekend runs. In the meantime, my performance is steadily improving. The gains aren't dramatic but they're real. Is it more frequent workouts, more miles or getting more sleep? Yes.

The history of my running speed

Directional declines

Today's run (street): 3.6 miles

I decided to do some data mining on Garmin Connect to compare my historical averages with my current performance. In order to keep the information consistent, I only used data captured from one source, my Garmin 210 that I bought in 2010. I know I've lost a lot of speed over the past year and my interest was in seeing whether my recent history is an aberration, or if it merely reflects a long term decline.

Charting the trends reveals a changing relationship between race speed and overall speed. My average pace has followed a linear decline, but my race paces have dropped measurably since 2012. Up to 2012, I generally paced 7.5% better in races compared to my overall average. After 2012, that gap has closed and is now almost equal to my training run times.

As I often say when working with business data, these findings are only directional. The Garmin data, acquired by GPS, has a variable margin of error. I tried to correct for that as much as I could, but the numbers do have some skew. I only selected runs I'd tagged as "street running" to filter out slower trail paces and faster track paces. It's also important to note that the 2014 data is only through May 25, not a full year.

In terms of these findings, I'm not happy to see declines, but at least the drop-off has not been as sharp as I'd suspected. I did today's run as a tempo, taking it easy through the majority of the distance and picking up the pace more at the end. The last mile was a minute faster than the prior few, and I finished feeling great. I wish I could tap into that speed more often, but based on my recent race performances, it's a little more complicated than just trying a little harder.

Athlinks bemoans declining race times

Today's run (street): 2.5 miles

I had a funny exchange yesterday with Troy Busot, the founder of Athlinks. This website aggregates race results and allows members to compile a rich racing history. Athlinks members can comment on their race experiences and compare their performance to "rivals" (other members who have participated in 2 or more of the same races that you've run).

The reason I contacted Troy was that he'd sent an email that, in a tongue and cheek way, chided runners for what he called, "an alarming decline in U.S. racing performances in distances across the board." He compared average finish times for the most common race distances plus Olympic, Half and Full Ironman Triathlons. He made his point but I noticed that his times for half marathons were exactly the same as for 10K's, an obvious typo:

Average Times for Leading
Race Distances from 2009-2012

Distance	2009	2012	Change	% Change
5K Run	30:30	31:47	+1:17	+4.04%
10K Run	1:01:01	1:02:28	+1:27	+2.34%
Half Mara	1:01:01	1:02:28	+0:18	+0.15%
Marathon*	4:33:18	4:33:13	-0:04	-0.03%
Olympic Tri	2:52:53	2:55:55	+3:02	+1.73%
Half Iron	5:59:43	6:05:49	+6:06	+1.73%
Ironman	12:49:44	13:11:39	+21:54	+2.77%
* Marathon times were the only notable improvement.

Troy quickly fell on his sword after I sent him a note about it and he gave me the correct figures for 2009 and  2012, which were 2:15:16 and 2:16:40 respectively. Troy wrote, "Yep, I have quit the company in typo-shame." I've never run a full marathon but I have run the other distances. In every case (except my first half), I've beaten the average, both for 2009 and 2012. So perhaps I'm not as average as I thought, although my scores would not be so favorable were the comparison more age and gender based.

Speaking of average, my pace this morning was exactly that. The temperature was 35 degrees with a noticeable breeze, and I wore some extra layers anticipating the cold. I stayed comfortable throughout the run and didn't really have a clue how fast I was going until I looked at my heart rate near the end. I saw that I was at 80% of Max. I tried to get it to 85% in the remaining quarter mile, but I didn't quite get there. Even so, my average morning run still gets me around the course 45 seconds per mile faster than the 5K average!