January Mileage Update

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At the end of last year, I noticed a lot of people posting about the number of miles they had completed via swim/bike/run, and I realized I had no clue how far I had gone. I had a good guess on biking, since I always used my Garmin to track my distance, be it indoors or outdoors, but I hadn’t been logging treadmill distances, and who knew how much swimming I had done. So this year, I’m trying to get every workout logged into Strava so I can track how far I’ve gone.

In January, I:

Ran 46 miles
Biked 227 miles
Swam 4.2 miles

Not bad for a month with a few missed workouts.

Obviously, the biking mileage is a bit misleading, because indoor mileage doesn’t completely translate to outdoor mileage, but it’s the best measurement I’ve got right now.

I’m pretty pleased with the run mileage as well. 46 miles really isn’t a lot, but I remember the days when I was primarily a runner and I would push to make it to 50 miles a month. Now I’m doing multi-sport training but still getting in some quality mileage.

I don’t have any specific distance goals for the year, primarily because I have no idea what my distance totals have been for recent months and years, so I don’t know what a good goal might be. I guess my goal is just to continue to track and log workouts in Strava. It’s an easy way to keep a record of what I’ve done in one place, plus it’s nice that it automatically tells me when I’m making some sort of improvement. I’m a sucker for data, even when I don’t actually understand what it means.

One thing I’ve discovered about tracking my workouts is that it can reframe how I felt about a workout. I’ll go out for a run and come back feeling like it was terrible. I feel like I struggled for pace, or just couldn’t find a groove. And then I look at the stats from the run and compare it to previous workouts and find that I was faster than I was before. So of course it feels a bit harder. I just didn’t realize I was running faster.

Plus it’s just fun to be able to see what I accomplished. I’m not doing it to compare to anyone else, because I’m sure there are people who easily completed ten times the distance I did this month. I just want to be able to compare to me.

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