A Year of Personal Records in Running!

On a slightly different note, this year has been a great year of running for me! I keep a training log on www.runnersworld.com and if you are in the market for a training log, I would highly recommend this one. I had been lazy in documenting my daily miles the last month, and finally sat down to do so this morning. It turns out I am only 41 miles away from 1,000 miles for the year, and I've got 10 days to meet that goal! I've got a long run of 12 miles planned for this weekend with my running buddies and a Fun Run of 5 miles on Thursday at the local Fleet Feet store, but aside from that I'm on my own. I'll be bugging Skyler to run with me. :)

Here is a quick recap of this wonderful year of running. February I paid to be a member of a training group for a local half marathon. I had run 6 half marathons before, but had run them all with my best training buddy, Skyler. He, unfortunately, was injured most of this year, so I had to resort to paying for companionship. That specific half marathon (the Hogeye, in case anyone was wondering) was the worst race in my repertoire, but I did end up making lots of new running friends. After the race I picked up my training, mostly fueled by the newly found encouragement of my new friends. I have put in some solid weeks of high miles (exceeded 30 miles on most weeks and even hit a week of more than 40 miles), and set PRs (personal-records) in every race distance:

5k: time of 22:39, pace 7:19min/mile at the Eureka Springs Sports Festival

10k: time of 47:58, pace 7:49min/mile at the Race for the Cure of the Ozarks in Bentonville

Half Marathon: time of 1:45:28, pace 8:04min/mile at the Winslow Run for the Squirrels

Marathon: time of 3:59:28, pace 9:09min/mile at the Dallas White Rock (this was my very first marathon!)

Next year I hope to set new records and run even further! I was very surprised by how much I enjoyed the marathon, and plan on doing another one this upcoming year..now I just have to rope Sky in!

Here is a neat graph of my monthly mileage from runnersworld:

Happy Running!

M.