Running Geek

I'm getting my organised geek on big time this week - more on that later.

But one of todays tasks was to finally do a list of all of my runs etc., to record my run times!

You'd think I would have done this, before now.  I've been running for over 2 years.  Apart from the fact these last 2 years have fallen into an organisational crumpled heap, I guess I have also just had no real passion to do this.  Apart from making it under the finish banner before officials boot people off course, I just haven't ever been too interested in my times.  For me, until now at least, running for me personally, has been about complete other things.

Don't get me wrong - I take note of my times at each event, and look my results up, and discuss with friends, and try to recall whether that's "good for me".  But really, that's about it.  Sometimes I don't even look it up, and more than several times, I've had friends look up my previous results and text them to me, to show that I've improved.  (Or not, as the case can be!)  Maybe this makes me a non serious runner, but that's just how it is.  I run for my own

purposes, and up till now, those purposes haven't been highly speed based.

However. :)

As the ass print in my bed will prove, I have spent literally hours and hours today, going over all of my previous race results.  I wanted to do this for a few reasons:

• I have always meant to!
• For record management
• To finally allow myself to have a better understanding of my average times
• To allow me to develop new goals 
• To allow me to plan my next steps with running
• To get data to help me determine some health issues (ie. my back issues)
• To give me a bit of spark and excitement for future runs - actually make some time based goals!
• I also wanted to make sure I had saved all of my photos and race certificates for each event
• And lastly, I promised I would do this, here on my blog, a little while ago :)

I'm so glad I've done this list!  I ended up recording so much more than times.  It's basically a highly functional inventory of each of my runs to date.  Obviously, the plan is to now keep this up to date, at the time, from now on.

I got really into it, and also made a list of stats for myself, after looking at the data.  It was really interesting.  I recorded my PB's for each distance, and how many races I'd done in each distance, and how many runs etc. all up.  I included all event types that I've done, but the main purpose is for my running.  I basically included any official race event, including parkruns.  I'm going to get really nerdy and make some basic graphs to help me work some further stuff out, but that will come another day.

Anyway I thought I'd share some of my stats with you!

The most interesting thing I worked out, is extremely coincidentally, this Sunday is going to mark my 60th event, ever, and my 50th official run!  How special is that, and to work that fact out just a few days before.

Out of those 60 events, 36 were done last year alone, in 2013!

The 60 are made up of:

• 1 cycling event
• 1 walking event
• 1 obstacle event
• 7 triathlons
• 50 running events

Five of the running events are 10km events.  Out of the five, three of my race times were 1:17!  (1:17:12, 1:17:52 and 1:17:59).  I'm not the most consistent person, so this was pretty cool to notice.

I also noticed some not so great things, such as, I haven't been to parkrun since February!... :o

I'll pop some more stats up on the Kate Does Life page soon.

And, I'll report back in soon and let you know how my 50th official run goes on Sunday! :)