Looking Forward

This blog started with a New Year’s resolution of running 25 miles a week for the entire year, with the intent of preparing for a marathon that I had signed up for last October. This goal of running 25 miles a week lasted less than half a year, but I don’t feel too bad about it because I ran two marathons. Mission accomplished (mostly).

Tonight I ran an entire mile on the treadmill, pain-free, so I’m going to keep testing it and see if I can at least half-ass my 25 mile/week resolution for the rest of the year, but I’m sure it won’t actually amount to all that mileage. Which is why it’s time to move on to my next goal. I was going to wait until New Year’s to start, but I think this one might require more than a year to accomplish, so I could use the extra couple of months.

This year was all about running for a really long time. I discovered that though sometimes running for a really long time is painful, it’s not that hard to push myself to do it. This coming year, I’m going to focus on running for very short amounts of time – that is, it’s high time I break some PRs.

Over on the right I’ve listed all my PRs. In 2001, it will have been nine years since I PR’ed in the mile, and TEN since I’ve PR’ed in the 5k. There is nothing more depressing to me than the thought of peaking at the age of 14 or 15. I can’t describe how terrible I feel about the idea of never running that fast again. The worst part is that I had no idea how amazing it was that I could run that fast. I knew it was pretty cool, but I also took it for granted. Here’s a really great scanned image of my running log from the week I PR’ed in the mile:

When I PR’ed in the 5k, I did actually point out that it was a PR, but here I don’t even do that. There is nothing special looking about the fact that I had just run the fastest mile of my life, up to at least the age of 24. So now I need a fastest-ever-mile-redo, when I’ll actually appreciate it. I put my fastest 1500 into a pace calculator (5:20) and it’s telling me that this is equivalent to a 5:43 mile, but I’m ignoring that because that sounds entirely impossible. So my goal for 2011 is to run a 5:50 mile.

I have no idea if this is possible, or how to go about doing it, but I would like it to happen. I’d also like to set a new PR for my 5k (20:33), but I figure if I can get the mile thing taken care of, the 5k part will be a little easier.

I’m half super excited about the idea of running that fast again, and half really bored of all these numbers I’m talking about. So here’s a super cute picture of Pascal when he was just a baby:

PS. I just remembered sometimes I start talking about PRs and nobody knows what I’m talking about. This is weird to me, because everyone ought to know what a PR is. But just in case you don’t, it stands for Personal Record. And now you know.

Miles run this week: 1
Miles run in 2010: 511