adminI had intended to write separate blogs for each of the two marathons that I ran this year, but I had been so busy and mentally drained around the time that I ran them that I just couldn’t get around to doing that. Now that I do have the time and mental capacity, as I type this on Christmas Day, it feels fitting to think about the year as a whole as it comes to a close. In January, I set a pretty arbitrary goal of running 1,500 miles and biking 1,500 miles in 2022. The rough historical benchmarks I was using for these goals were 1,400 miles of running in 2020 with minimal biking, and about 1,000 miles each of biking and running in 2021; so 1,500 and 1,500 seemed like attainable-but-challenging-myself goals.
Using those rough ideas of historical benchmarks got me to thinking about how I got here with that many miles being my goal, so I downloaded all my Strava data to investigate. Spoiler: I didn’t achieve my 1,500/1,500 goal for 2022. I’m currently at 1,327run/1,048bike with 5 days to go. But! that is a combined total mileage of 2,375, which is a 20% increase from my prior best combined total mileage of 1,993 (962 run/1,031bike) from 2021. I’ll write about the specifics of 2022 in a bit, but want to go through the history first. I didn’t start using Strava until 2017 when I trained for my first half marathon, so that’s when the data starts. But before I dig into that, I summarized all the “big events” I’ve participated in going back to 2014, which was my first year post-FSA, which is why and how I started filling my time with all of this starting then. This list is limited to half marathon or more, except for the Harpoon 5 Miler in 2017 which I included because it is noteworthy as one of my best all-time runs, hitting 40 minutes exactly. I was fast af in 2017, due in part to weighing only 100 pounds.
In 2020, even though all races were cancelled, and nothing shows up on this list, I was 100% trained up to run a solid full marathon. At the peak, during the 4 week period from May 11 to June 7, my weekly mileage was: 61, 60, 58, 60, and included long runs of 18, 20, 18, 20 each Sunday respectively. I also ran 100 miles in 10 days to end the year (December 20, 2020 through December 30, 2020) because I randomly challenged myself to do so and had nothing better to do.
In addition to the organized events listed above, I have done a ton of long distances on my own, or in the case of 50+ mile bike rides, sometimes with small groups for portions of them. I summarized the count of all distance activities below.
The historical annual totals surprised me a bit at first. I did not remember riding my bike so sparsely in 2019 and 2020. But 2019 was the first year I didn’t do Best Buddies because Steve O left JH, and 2020 was 2020, and I didn’t learn the fun skills of route planning and self-reliance until 2021. In 2016, I trained pretty seriously for Best Buddies after having a horribly difficult time after not training in 2015, so I would guess that my bike mileage was around 500 in 2016. Then in 2017, I switched most of my effort to running.
This graph shows the cumulative miles and counts at monthly granularity over the last 6 years. It’s cool to me how linear the running is, since that implies consistency over time. I like how you can see the line flatten out every January when it sucks to run for 3 months. The bike ride graphs are very lumpy because I only ride my bike from April to October (it’s too cold to be enjoyable otherwise) and because each bike ride produces many more miles than each run.
The same story is seen below by zooming into each year and plotting them independently.
I thought it would be fun to graph mileage by day of the week. I’m not surprised biking skews more towards the weekend than running because biking on the weekend would be a 50+ mile ride compared to 8 miles weekday commuting for work. Running is something like 10+ miles weekend run compared to 5 miles weekday run. I was a little surprised at the large skew toward Saturday relative to Sunday for biking. I would have guessed it would be more even like running is, but now thinking back, it does feel like most training rides with Steve and crew would be on Saturdays.
In the next post I’ll go into the details of my 2022 training and marathon performance.