Fun With Numbers

I had an epic running week this week, at least for me.  I ran 9.9 miles on Tuesday, 5 on Thursday, 5.1 on Saturday and 20.3 today.  My total for the week was 40.3.  While many of the people I follow on Twitter and DailyMile can do that easily, for me this is a huge week.  It got me to thinking, I wonder if it was my biggest week ever.

My training log goes back to the very end of 1998.  While I have pockets of data prior to 1999, it is nothing reliable, so the beginning of 1999 is where I can start.  I grouped all of my runs by week in a long list.  623 weeks in total!  Upon further analysis, I found that this ranked as my third biggest week ever.

• Second biggest was 40.8, back in 2005, the week I ran the Big Sur Marathon.  On that week, I ran 5.5 on Monday, 5.9 on Wednesday, and 3.2 on Saturday.
• The winner, of my biggest week ever, was actually in April of this year!  In that week, I ran 22 miles on Sunday, from Van Cortlandt Park all the way down the west side and around the battery and up the East Side to my apartment, in training for the Providence RI marathon.  In that same week, I ran 4 on Monday, 5.9 on Tuesday, 4.8 on Thursday, and 6.5 on Friday

So there you have it, my top 3 weeks ever!

A distribution of my running weeks, since 1999:

• 40+ = 3
• 30-39.9 = 18
• 20-29.9 = 63
• 10-19.9 = 209
• 5 – 9.9 = 137
• .1-4.9 = 93
• 0 = 100

That’s right, in the last 12 years, I’ve run 0 miles in the week 100 times, and less than 5 miles 93 times.  My average week is 10.59 miles.  The fact is that prior to 2008, 50 miles was a good month for me, and 600 miles for the year was a magic number I (barely) attained only 3 times.  Most years had far less miles.  After a disappointing NYC Marathon in 2007, I vowed to increase my mileage, and since early 2008 I have been able to do so.  The distribution with only the weeks since 1/1/2008 is much different, and my average is more than 65% higher at 16.66 miles:

• 40+ = 2
• 30-39.9 = 15
• 20-29.9 = 36
• 10-19.9 = 57
• 5 – 9.9 = 23
• .1-4.9 = 10
• 0 = 9

If you look at my monthly totals, you’ll see that I’ve only hit 100 miles in a month 4 times, and that includes this month, Nov 2010.  See below for my full monthly summaries (click for a bigger view).  I’m sure there are other interesting statistics here, but that is for another day…