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I started running 14 years ago. I was mostly just an 11 year old kid who wanted to do well at the Presidential Physical Fitness Test's 1 mile run because I had been the fastest kid in my class the previous year when I clocked a smoking 6:29 (my 6th grade class had 12 students or so; Niobrara Public Elementary School is not large). So, some time in February of 1995 I started running 1 mile per day to prepare for the P.E. class test some time in March. I ended up running 6:08. By my 12th birthday later that summer, I'd lowered that to a 5:32.

(Start of the Lake Okoboji Marathon near Spirit Lake, IA; July 19, 1996. I'm the tiny person in the blue singlet near the back.)

(Finishing my first marathon in 3:50:11, age 12, a year and a half after I'd started running.)

Because I had already consumed enough 70s-era running literature gleaned from the local Goodwills and second-hand bookstores, I began keeping a training log on April 12, 1995. It was in a spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook, the cover on which I soon glued a photocopied picture (see below) of Roger Bannister at the anguished moment of him breaking the finishing string of history's first sub-4minute mile.

Anyways, the point of this post is that this past weekend marked 14 years of recorded running for me. So, after going back through all my logs, I came up with a lifetime total of 47340 miles for those first 14 years. Divide that number by 5113 days and the result is a mathematical average of 9.26 miles per day. For 14 years. I'll take it.

As an aside, it just occurred to me that I am now roughly 2662 miles away from 50,000 lifetime miles, which seems like a nice round number. If I average 166 miles per week for the next 15 weeks or so, I should eclipse that milestone directly on my 26th birthday on August 2nd. We'll see.