Magic numbers

February has been and gone, and the last day was there before I knew it. That’s the trouble with signing up to a race so early in the year, one minute you are packing away the tinsel and ploughing through work in January , and then KAPOW ! it’s race day.

After running 12 miles last Sat and a nice easy 4 on Sunday , I took my foot of the gas and with one thing and another did not manage to run last week. So February mileage total was 66 – fair enough and a pleasing number.

Running has brought out the hidden statistician in me, in a way no amount of academic training or company forecasting ever could. Not that I am highly qualified in this area, but I do like a tidy number and like many runners spend way too much time thinking about the numbers around mileage, pace, distance covered, etc.

My average monthly mileage total has crept up a bit recently , but targets can get easily derailed if I am not following a challenge. I use Nike+ and there are a few of my fellow runners also on this, and although it is all very nicey nicey when we run alongside each other – the Nike+ leaderboard can bring out our inner competitor.

Saturday morning and a new month means we start all over again, and I noticed that my total Nike+ mileage was 2496. I have been recording my runs with Nike plus since Dec 26 2009 – when I got my first Nike+ sensor, before that I did not really record my mileage, but to be honest I was not really a regular runner back then.

I tend to run between 12 and 15 miles a week , which is definitely on the lower end of serious runners mileage, and I have been trying to up my running frequency to aim for 15-20. So this is by way of background as for many runners an annual total of around 600 miles is no big deal.

It kind of does not matter where on the running spectrum you lie, as the beauty of recording your mileage,however you choose to do it, is to look back and marvel at how many miles you have covered , and then as I do imagine that distance translated to distances between towns, cities or whatever.

So my total 2500 miles of running mileage would have taken me to Paris and back twice or I could have made 4.5 return journeys to Cambridge, England, but I am 1000 miles short of reaching Cambridge MA.

Anyhow, being a lover of a tidy number I headed out yesterday to get my 4 miles, and as a bonus I had a beautiful cool sunny morning and a nice route round Linlithgow Loch to see the dial whirr round in a pleasing way to 2500 miles, 700 runs and 275893 calories !