Two weeks, two miles, zero guilt

The nice thing about being a recreational jogger is that I don’t feel guilty about taking two weeks completely off. When I was serious about this running stuff, I would have never dreamed of taking two weeks off. It was impossibly for me to fully appreciate vacations because I had to find a time to run… every single day. Even when I went to places that had decent running trails, I wasn’t familiar with them and would end up doing simple out-and-backs to avoid getting lost. I remember one time in Sun River Oregon, my long run was a 90 minute out and back. Not 90 minutes total, 90 minutes in one direction followed by 90 (maybe 85) minutes in the other direction. Miserable right? That was the other thing about running in places where I didn’t know exactly how far a certain run was, I always made sure to be wildly conservative with my estimates. So I’d call a three hour run 20 miles, despite the fact that I probably wasn’t running any slower than 7:00 pace even on the hilly trail. It was crazy and sort of stupid, but that’s the way I was.

Now I can actually enjoy a vacation without that voice in the back of my head telling me to go running. Jenny and I were in Singapore and Bangkok the past two weeks visiting her parents and appreciating some well deserved time off (At least for Jenny. I’ve only been working at my new job since September and, like a normal person, I actually get weekends off). It was in the 80s-90s the entire trip with comically high humidity, not exactly the kind of weather I’d want to run in even if I did want to run. So over the two weeks I only jogged once, on a treadmill, for two miles. And I never even felt guilty about it. I was too busy enjoying the amazing sightseeing, food-eating, and elephant-riding.

Running two miles over the course of two weeks does set me back a bit on my mileage goal though. Fortunately a year is a really long time so I still only have to average about 28 miles per week the rest of the year and I’ll hit my 1380 miles easily. Since I aimed so low, taking two weeks off doesn’t actually set me back much from a fitness perspective because I don’t even have to be in shape to slog through a bunch of 30 mile weeks. It’s more a matter of finding the motivation to put one foot in front of the other for 30-45 minutes a day rather than being in shape enough to run any kind of respectable mileage.

With that said, here’s my strategy for the next month or so. This week, my goal is to hit 25 miles, that’s right about where I was before I spent two weeks gorging on pad thai and coconuts. Then I want to jump up to 30 miles per week for the entire month of February. That’s higher than I need to average for the year, but it’s still really low and shouldn’t be any problem. For a given week, that means running four out of the five weekdays, between four and five miles per day, and running six to seven miles Saturday and Sunday. I’d see an average week looking something like this:

Sunday: 6 miles
Monday: 4 miles
Tuesday: OFF
Wednesday: 5 miles
Thursday: 4 miles
Friday: 4 miles
Saturday: 7 miles

If anything, I might run a little shorter during the week and a little longer on the weekends since it’s actually mildly enjoyable to run at 9:00 when it’s light outside instead of before or after work when it’s dark and miserable outside. After four weeks or so at 30 miles per week, I’d like to bump it up a little bit to help make up for lost time and build a bit of a buffer. Ideally, I want to start hitting 10-12 mile long runs on Saturday and maybe 8 miles on Sunday. That’d actually be a somewhat respectable weekend of running and even if I continue my pathetic 4-5 mile runs the rest of the week, I could conceivably approach 40 miles per week. When it finally starts getting light enough before or after work, that’s when I’d consider bumping up the weekday runs. But still, I’m not going to push it. If I can knock out consistent 35 mile weeks by mid April, I’ll be happy.

This week so far:
Sunday: 0
Monday: 3.03