leftovers - the real reason i'm not running (data edition)

Bizarrely - but perhaps not surprisingly to my long-term readers - I have over two years of data to backup the conclusions I made in this post. When I crunched my meticulously tracked mileage, I realized that the regular thirty to thirty-five miles of running per week that I recorded at the start of my tracking in mid-2015 slowly and steadily declined to twenty miles per week at the start of 2018.

Here are the numbers (1):

Most people see a decline in athletic performance as they reach their late twenties. However, this decline is usually in the range of five to ten percent, not fifty percent. Whatever I was doing, it wasn’t working, and I needed to make some changes if I wanted to arrest my decline and bring that rate closer to the generally accepted range.

The good news here is that, all things considered, twenty miles a week is pretty good. For most people, twenty miles a week would be an accomplishment, not the back-end of a massive decline. Was my fitness situation so bad that I needed to make a change and write long blog posts about the switch?

I thought it was worth a try after realizing that although twenty miles a week is a great fitness accomplishment in general, it's OK to acknowledge that my standards for celebration are well above completing twenty miles per week. It speaks to an important truth - if I let the world tell me how good I am, I'll never come anywhere close to being as good as I can be.

Footnotes / methodology

1. The seven-day or thirty-day?

I should note that these numbers were calculated using a thirty-day running (!) average. What I did was add up all the mileage for the preceding thirty day period, divide the total by thirty to get an average mileage per-day, then multiply by seven to create a weekly average for a given day.

Why the thirty day method and not just a simple sum of the last seven days? I actually tried the latter method and concluded the thirty-day style made more sense for me. My running isn’t exactly dependent on the day of the week so having one instance of each named day in a seven day calculation didn’t help reduce any of the natural variation in my running cycle. Using thirty days proved a better methodology for me and helped track the variation created by the unpredictable nature of my running schedule.