I ran just over 1200 miles last year which obviously averages out at 100 miles per month. In fact, my miles were heavily biased towards the first five months of the year as I prepared for and completed my first 50 mile event. At the turn of the year I decided that I’d like to try to spread my effort more evenly across the year and so I started this year with the target of completing at least 100 miles each calendar month.
25 days into the year things are going well and I seem to have acquired an additional mileage target along the way. Having run 25 miles in the first two weeks of the year it occurred to me that as well as evening my miles out across the months I could also even them out across the weeks and aim for 25 miles EVERY week. Now I am sure that at some point I will fail with this challenge; I am bound to succumb to a cold or have to miss runs if I am away or something. But for as long as I can the target now is 25 miles each week and I have already achieved this for four consecutive weeks bringing up the 100 miles for January also.
My legs have felt tired this week, which surprised me a bit as 25 miles is not an exceptional mileage but when I thought about it I realised that, although my current mileage is a lot less than my peak weekly mileage last year, it is a LOT more than I managed through the autumn months of 2017. This is nicely highlighted by the plot below which shows my monthly totals for the last 12 months (so February 2017 – January 2018). January 2018’s total is not at all remarkable when compared with February, March, April and May 2017 but it is SIGNIFICANTLY up on the preceding four months and is, in fact, my highest monthly total since last May (when I ran the 50 miler).
Putting all of these miles into my legs feels really great. It is like putting petrol in the tank. To run a long way there is no substitute for putting miles in the legs (although it is obviously important to put them in in a sustainable manner and not to build up too quickly). I will probably ramp things up a bit over the next few months as I build towards the Southampton marathon in mid-April and then after that my aim will be to maintain at least my current effort. This plan might get blown out of the water by illness or injury or if I do some crazy long event again and need more rest afterwards, but for now it’s just a case of keeping things ticking along.
Tim O'Hare 