Annual year-end geek-out on my running data

ORN: This shivery December morning, with it 33° outside and lightly snowing, I ran 3 miles in 28'52". I took it way slow on account of tiredness, possible illness, and general bad attitude for not being back in my warm, toasty bed. Last run of 2008! Good riddance to a bad year.

Even though I am a huge nerd in more ways than I care to enumerate, I try not to assault my faithful readers with charts, graphs, and statistical analysis of questionable merit. Know that while you aren't looking, I'm obsessing about the data -- better ways to collect it, how to get more automated, what the trends mean. In fact, I think a lot about automation. Unfortunately for you, once a year, I like to put on my robe & wizard hat and dazzle you with my dorkiness. I'll try to be gentle.

Fact: I ran 680 miles in 2008. I ran on 167 days, which means I ran an average of 4.1 miles per workout.

Compared with 567 miles in 2007, that's a 20% improvement in total distance. And I think I am a little quicker now, maybe thirty seconds or a minute quicker per mile. I busted my 1,000 kilometer goal back in November; it'll be my challenge to kill the 1,000 mile goal in 2009.

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Here is the monthly breakdown of miles with the number of workouts in brackets:

• January: 60.3 [14]
  
• February: 84.7 [16]
  
• March: 93.4 [16]
  
• April: 79.4 [15]
  
• May: 44.8 [11]
  
• June: 41.5 [12]
  
• July: 43.8 [14]
  
• August: 60.0 [15]
  
• September: 23.0 [7]
  
• October: 48.6 [16]
  
• November: 53.2 [15]
  
• December: 46.5 [14]
  

Alert readers may question my arithmetic, but, after mocking them to all my imaginary friends, I shall point out that there were several iterations of rounding going on, fractions of miles here and there. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to identify my best and worst months. Make a Pareto chart (sorted histogram) or something. They are fun.

Suffice it to say that I had my ups and downs this year. Looking ahead to 2009, I plan on having ups and downs too. However, I hope that my ups are a little higher and my downs a little farther from [or not equal to] zero.