Sunday, April 03, 2011

My running adventure

Recently I have become a believer is setting goals and striving to reach them.  I, like many other people, have established goals that are to last a year, beginning on January 1st.  I don't like to call them New Year's resolutions, because they are easy to abandon once the year doesn't feel as new as it did in early January.  One of my goals this year is to run 1,000 miles.  As a bit of perspective, I ran track at Indiana Wesleyan University and was a sprinter for 3 years (early graduation).  1,000 miles may be more than I ran that entire 3 years combined.  If not more, then it was close to 1,000 miles.  It works out to about 3 miles per day, and allows me to miss a day or two every so often for injury, difficult scheduling, or just rest.  Also, I am allowing myself to substitute 3 miles on a bike for 1 mile on foot with a maximum of 750 (250 of credit).  This will give me an opportunity to break up the monotony of running every day and allow my bones to rest from the pounding.  Since I started, I have gotten quite a bit faster and have much better endurance over the length of the run.  I know if my goal was to "run more" I would have fizzled out by now.  But since I have a defined distance and know what I need to do every day I have been much more consistent.  You can follow my progress here.  Click on "Chart 1" to see how many miles I need to run each day and how many I have acutally run to that date.  Click on "Chart 2" to see how many miles ahead or behind pace I was at that time.