It begins...

I ran 5,977.78 miles in 2006. I was a machine. Every day I woke up at 6:45 and went running, on Monday through Friday I ran again in the afternoon. Sunday was a long run of at least 20 miles and Saturday was an easy day of "only" 12. It sounds a little crazy to me now, but at the time I was focused, dedicated and disciplined. My goal was to help my team qualify for NCAA Nationals and I knew the best way to do that was to run my ass off every single day. I truly enjoyed it at the time, but running that much on that rigid of a schedule is mentally and physically exhausting. By the end of the year I was burned out. I had achieved my goal of qualifying for Nationals but my competitive running career was over. I stopped enjoying the peaceful feel of a cool 12 miles in the morning before most college kids had even woken up. It  started to feel more like job than a passion, which was ironic because I avoided getting a job all through college so that it wouldn't interfere with my running. So I retired. I hung up the racing spikes and sat on the couch.

I know I'm never going to be in that kind of shape again in my life. Lance Armstrong can make a heroic comeback from stage four lung cancer to win the Tour de France annually for the better part of a decade -- but he's a professional athlete. I'm just some dude who does computery medical record stuff and watches a little too much football. For me, a comeback has a slightly different definition. My 2012 New Years Resolution is to average running as many miles per month as I averaged per week in 2006: 115 (rounded up). So that's 1,380 miles for the year, a little over 26 per week. To give you a sense of where I'm at right now, in 2011 I think I ran about 115 miles total. This is going to be quite a jump, but I figure new year resolutions have a success rate lower than Tim Tebow's completion percentage so if I do fail it won't be the end of the world.

Back in the day, I kept a precise running log of all my runs (this explains why I knew my 2006 yearly mileage to the nearest hundredth of a mile (it doesn't explain why I was so obsessed that I needed to measure my runs to the nearest hundredth of a mile before the era of MapMyRun iPhone apps)). In 2012, I'll instead do the hipster thing and keep a running blog. This will hopefully keep me motivated by not wanting to let down the half a dozen people who end up reading this (hi mom!).

Let's quickly lay down the game plan and get a few preemptive excuses out of the way. January is going to be a really low month. I'll be digging myself quite the hole to climb out of. Not only is it dark before I go to work in the morning and before I come home in the evening, but I'm also going to Singapore and Thailand for two weeks with Jenny and her parents. The over/under for my total mileage while I'm there is zero (take the under). If my monthly mileage for January is 50 I'll be pleasantly surprised. My goal is to really ramp things up in the spring and summer when the weather's nicer and I can get in some long-ish runs. If I can string together a few 50-60 mile weeks in July and August, I think I'll be able to pull this thing off. Mainly, I just want to still be in the hunt when November and December roll around so I can pull off my own version of #TebowTime by going for 12 mile runs everyday and finish the year with an incredible comeback, logging the 1,380th mile as the clock strikes midnight. My other goal is to continue to make two Tim Tebow references every entry. Not really. But maybe.