A Year of Running

Yeah, yeah, everybody is doing end of the year review posts, or posts looking forward to the next year. But I wanted to mess around with the Google Charts API, and figured my running mileage data was as good a data source as I'd find. So here's the chart I made with my monthly miles:
The lightest blue indicates months with less than 100 miles run, and the one darkest (August) was the only month I passed 200 miles.

Perhaps I should have waited through the next two days to post this, in case I decide to run. But even if I go both remaining days in December, I probably won't go more than 8 miles total. That won't affect my totals too much. Currently I've chalked up 1259 miles this year, occupying a little over 168 hours (= 1 full week). That puts my average pace at just slower than 8 minute miles. I thought about making another chart for my average pace each month, but don't feel like going through the computations. Another useless stat: I went for 178 runs, putting my average run length at just over 7 miles. That's an extra 250 miles and 28 runs over last year.

After August I was looking to crack 1500 miles this year, and was on pace for it. In September I ran my first 'ultra', though really the shortest ultra, a 50k. At that point, my running was looking pretty good, and I was thinking about a sub-3 hour marathon in Richmond in November, and doing a 50 mile run in the spring. However, my research was, as my advisor put it, 'stagnating'. Around the same time I met a girl (lucky me :)), and these factors put a 2 month halt in my running. I'm working on getting back into it, though still at a lesser volume. My current goal is the Charlottesville marathon in April, for my third consecutive year. I have no delusions of beating last year's 3:13, but I'm still hoping for sub-4 (had a 3:55 my first year). Guess we'll see.