The Seduction of Mileage

You know I've always been one of those runners who always laughs a little under his breath when people get obsessed with their Garmins, heart rate monitors, or fixating on a certain weekly, monthly, or yearly mileage goal. In fact as late as January or February of this year I was still in the camp of avoiding too much mileage just for the sake of mileage and taking a day or two of the week to cross train on the eliptical or stationary bike and not really caring or trying to figure out how that fit into my total "mileage." I guess that in part was why my weekly "mileage" number was a bit meaningless to me because even if I was running 50 or 60 miles I was still doing more than a typical 50 or 60 mile per week runner because I was doing it on just 5 runs a week and I had extra training I wasn't even including but must have counted for something. Anyway I have to officially admit I have been seduced a bit by the mileage game since I have upped my mileage and started running doubles recently. A few weeks ago I added an extra mile here or there just to hit 80 instead of 78 for the week, this week I just hit 83 and I will probably take tomorrow off because that is what I would normally do with the number of days I've run and the work I've put in but it is tempting to go out for an easy run and hit 90 for the first time. The real change in my thinking though is that I do judge my weeks some right now on how much mileage I run, which is something I never did in the past. I'm not sure if I like this development or not but I guess it will all come down to how I race later this year in some half marathons and in the marathon. There is also no question that if possible I would like to hit 3,000 miles for the year as I'm just a couple miles shy of 1,800 right now.

Anyway for those interested today's organized long training run with New York Roadrunners went reasonably well as I stuck with the 7 minute per mile group for 16 miles and ran an easy 3+ miles each way to and from the start for a total of 22.5 miles today. The run was nothing to write home about and I would have started struggling with a couple more miles at 7 minute pace but I felt reasonably good at least for the temperature climbing towards 80 degrees (the lower humidity made such a difference though) and having run my highest mileage week ever. Now if I can just drop 10 seconds off that per mile pace and hold it for an additional 10 miles by November 1 in hopefully much cooler conditions when I'm rested and I'll be all set.