Training Without Any Goals in Mind

It has now been 7 weeks since I ran the Santa Barbara Marathon and I'm still in kind of limbo mode, still running, but without any particular goals.

Some friends are urging me to train for the L.A. Marathon, but that's only 7 weeks away and I don't have enough time to train sufficiently for that.

I had planned to run the 25th Anniversary Great Race of Agoura Hills' Cheseboro Half Marathon on March 27th, but I already have several other commitments that day.

When there's a race paid for and committed to and calendarized, I train harder. There are other races out there I could pick, but I think I'm procrastinating because a) deep down inside I'm feeling like I don't have the desire to train "hard" right now and b) I'm enjoying just getting out there and running without any particularly urgencies, goals and pressures.

We had a lot of rain the other week and somehow I managed to stay dry all but one day that week. I LOVE running in light rain and in between storms, when the air is clean and cool. 

The only thing I don't like about the rain is that it muddies up the trails that I usually run in. So I'm relegated to the roads when it rains. But I don't mind.

This time off from running hard and racing is good for my body and brain. But I'm still doing about 35 miles per week, so it's not like I'm completely slacking off.

And as I start to feel stronger and gradually build up the mileage, what I've been doing once or twice a week is "fartlek" (yes, I know, I reacted the same way when I first heard that term, and in fact still do). Fartlek is Swedish for "speed play" - a training system where fast burst of running are interspersed with slower running.

The beauty of fartlek, other than its cool name, is that you can do it anytime in any workout. What I like to do is run a long road with cross streets, running one block fast, one block slow, one block fast, one block slow, alternating to get a little speed workout in without the inconvenience of driving to the track.

By introducing a bit of this fartlek training into some of my everyday runs, I ease my way back into the mindset of training hard and picking a new race to conquer!

Running Has Been the Constant in My Life for 15 Years

Ever since Cinco de Mayo 1993, the second most constant, recurring activity in my life has been running.  The only other more consistent activity I can think of is my habit of brushing my teeth and using Listerine 2 times per day and flossing every night.

Yes, I started running on May 5, 1993 and diligently started tracking the number of miles I ran each day on an Excel spreadsheet.  This same spreadsheet is now over 6,000 rows long as I continue to add to it.

This spreadsheet is nothing too fancy.  Basically started out by jotting down how many miles, rounded to the nearest tenth of a mile, I ran each day. There is a column showing cumulative year-to-date mileage and later I added columns to show 7 and 10 day rolling average.  There is also a cumulative mileage column along the lines of the odometer on my car.

In late 1998 I started thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to see how much of my life is spent running each year. So I started tracking the number of minutes run each day along with the mileage.  Eventually I stopped tracking mileage on a "precise" basis (e.g. driving the course to get an exact tally or wear a device that measures mileage like the Nike+ iPod chip that I quickly grew tired of) and started estimating mileage based on time run and running effort.

The next year, 1999, was my personal record for most mileage run in one year: 3,645 miles. It took me 28,809 minutes, or about 480 hours, not including stretching and showers, to run those miles.  I ran a decent 2 hour, 36 minute marathon that year, one minute off my personal best time. That's the last time I ran under 2 hours, 40 minutes in a marathon.

But I 'm not so sad.  I had a good string of marathons from 1996 to 1999 (6 sub-2:40 performances). While injuries, aging and life has prevented such performance since then, I have not stopped running.

Through thick and thin, girlfriends, breakups, marriage, kids, job changes, good times, bad times, happy times, stressful times, sadness, frustration and everything else life threw at me, I've continued running.

I write this literally at 1:20 am on a Thursday night.  It was 11 pm when I started, but my 4 year old apparently has the stomach flu and I've alternated between keyboard and changing sheets. But I still plan to drag my lifeless body out of bed at 6:30 am to do my daily run.

Running keeps me sane and whole.  Without running, I wouldn't feel good. Even when I don't feel good, I go out there and run. Running is "me" time, time that no one can take away. Running is my rock. My good friend that I can turn to when I need to clear my head.

Been Running Since May 5, 1993 and Tallying Mileage Ever Since

Since running the Santa Barbara Marathon on December 5th, my training has been pretty sparse.  I took the first 3 days post-marathon off and ran only 10 miles the entire week.  Then more recently, my bad back problem made a reappearance and I was hobbling around for a week, walking like an 99 year old man, beginning on Christmas Eve.  Thanks to my stellar chiropractor I was back in action after 2 treatments.

On New Year's Eve, after dining on sushi with my 6 year old and reading Power Ranger stories to my 4 year old, then after a couple glasses of bubbly, I updated my 16 year old, 6,100 row Excel spreadsheet that tracks my daily mileage.  In fact, I updated the spreadsheet while celebrating the New Year with my Twitter friends.

Yes, my obsessive compulsive side forces me to jot down how much time and how many estimated miles I run each day in my daily calendar book, then periodically (used to be weekly, then monthly, now annually) I updated the manual scribbles from my book into the monster spreadsheet.

If I lose this spreadsheet, I lose a big part of me. This 1.3 MB spreadsheet is the Bible of my running. I used to study it like I was studying for an exam. It was fun to see trends...weekly mileage, how I did in a race after running at a certain level, etc. Now it is more chore than anything. But it is something I must do.  It is a 16 year running journal and I'm determined to maintain it.

My running began on Cinco de Mayo 1993, the day after telling a marathon runner co-worker, in my drunken stupor at a chili cook-off, that I would run next year's Los Angeles Marathon. While I don't remember the specifics of that first run, I look at the spreadsheet and see that I ran 3.2 miles that day.

Something I DO remember about that first run is that I had to stop because, as I recall, my ankle hurt. So I ran a few blocks, stopped, started again, stopped, and so on. I see in the log that the next day I did not run, but the day after that I ran 3.2 miles again.

How did I know it was 3.2 miles and not 3 miles or 3.5 miles? Well for many years, in my youth and without wife and kids and life's goings on consuming my time, I would literally drive the course I ran and track it on the car's odometer.  I drew a map of my neighborhood and tracked distances for various courses, streets, turnaround points, etc.  But I was really into it back then.

Today I measure most all of my runs by time, not by actually measured mileage. I have a pretty good gauge on my running speed and generally can estimate fairly well what my pace is, be it 7 min/mile, slower or faster.  Obviously it isn't 100% accurate, but based on the 42,900 miles I've run between May 5, 1993 and December 31, 2009, I think my pace estimate is pretty well dialed in.

So here's to a Happy New Year and New Decade 2010 and may you resolve to track your mileage in a monster Excel spreadsheet like me!

For the record, I logged 1,971 miles in 2009 over the course of 14,346 minutes (or about 239 hours). Wow, that is a lot of time spent running! But I love it!