This is the week of the year that I am always the most excited about running. The start of the new year always invigorates me to do more and better, despite the cold temperatures. Therefore, I typically sign up for speed work in Jan. In fact, and this will be the subject of my next planned blog post, January is the month of the year in which I’ve logged the most cumulative miles, at least over the last 13 years of my running log…
I love my Excel running log, and sometimes I can get lost in it. Tonight is the first session of the NYRR speed training class that I’ll be taking, which runs for the next 10 weeks. My log tells me that this will be my 20th NYRR speed class session since 1/1/1999, and my 11th time taking the session in Jan out of the last 13 years! I skipped 2011 because I was a bit burned out after training for a Jan marathon. I’m not quite sure why I skipped 2003. It most like was due to injury (?) as 2003 was my lowest running year on record with 123.2 miles. I think that was the year I had a nasty case of plantar fasciitis that year that took months to heal. Or was it the year I had patellar tendinitis? Who knows anymore…
Anyway, my interest today was in the weather. I can’t help myself, as a recovering numbers AND weather geek! It has been interesting to see so many people comment on Twitter on both the exceptionally warm weather we had over New Years (highs in the low 50s), and the exceptionally cold weather we are having today, 20s and dropping.
I took a look at the weather conditions for the first day of the Jan speed session I attended over the years, and was not so surprised to find it is pretty evenly split between cold, normal and hot:
- 1-4-00 – 55 – rain
- 1-2-01 – 21/2
- 1-8-02 – 34 / 26
- 1-6-04 – 28 / 22
- 1-4-05 – 48
- 1-3-06 – 35 – fr rain
- 1-4-07 – 55
- 1-8-08 – 57
- 1-6-09 – 31 / 25 – fr rain
- 1-5-10 – 27 / 15
Four times over 45 degrees, three times under 30 degrees, and three right in the 30s. Tonite will certainly compete for coldest yet, as the temperatures might get below 21, but it is not very windy and so the wind chill should stay above the 2 degrees it was in 2001.
