50,000 miles

Today, Halloween 2009, my personal lifetime odometer flipped over to the 50,000 mile figure.  It took me 14 years, six months, and 19 days of recorded running (since April 12th, 1995) to reach that mark.  Over my lifetime of running thus far I have achieved a mathematical average of 9.4 miles per day, which includes vast stretches of non-running days due to various injuries.  I guess I should shoot for 100k by my 40th birthday?

Today's particular run was not much different than any of my other runs recently, of course.  I took a run to the top of Green Mt. here in Boulder via Flagstaff Road and the Ranger trail.  Despite getting ~30 inches of snow here earlier in the week, the sun was strong enough today to run shirtless as long as I wasn't in the shade.  The Ranger trail had been superbly packed into a trench (likely by the crowd of Basic runners) that provided some surprisingly tacky footing, which made for an unexpectedly easy ascent and descent.  It was just another glorious day in the mountains.  Which is not meant to be a trivial statement.

The funny thing about noting a landmark milestone such as this is that I find myself increasingly unconcerned with the number of miles I rack up in a given time period.  Especially since moving to Boulder, where the mountain trails are particularly steep and rocky, keeping too close of an eye on the number of miles covered is fairly silly and even counterproductive. 

 

And yet, I do keep track.  Maybe it has to do with my running roots in the hills of Nebraska where most of the dirt roads are surveyed on a perfect mile by mile grid, denoting the section lines.  There, it was almost impossible to not notice how many miles I'd gone.  Maybe it has to do with the classic standard that a "mile" is in the running world.  Most American distance runners quantify their training volume with this arbitrary unit of length.  Nevertheless, even given the assured amount of error in my total, I think it is still worth it to continue to maintain such records, if only for historical comparison, and to be able to--with some level of veracity--claim that I have run the equivalent of twice around the globe at its equator.

Tonight I dashed out into the Halloween darkness for another easy seven miles in the moonlight to supplement this morning's 18.  The legs felt splendid and clicked over effortlessly.  And, when I was finished I was sure of at least one thing--even after 50,020 miles, I have yet to achieve redundancy.  And I don't expect to anytime soon.