Tracking Progress

Many runners seem to be a little obsessive-compulsive about recording their runs.  Morris downloads his daily workouts to the Garmin site, and tracks his heart rate recovery during a session of intervals.  I like to keep up with my mileage (overall mileage last year:  1241 miles - see October 7 post) and I also record the times for my interval sessions and tempo runs, to the second.  And I use a little daily calender called a "Day Runner" simply because it is what I have used for 15 years or so.  Also, this information won't disappear when my hard drive fails.

Last Friday I began my little program of learning to run fast again.  I did not say what those two initial 400-meter intervals were because they were so embarrassingly slow.  (They were 2:06 and 2:05.)  Yesterday I ran four "road intervals" with Morris - that is, we included some 400-meter intervals in the course of running 4.28 miles.  My times were 1:59, 2:01, 2:01, and 2:01.  (It is always remarkable to me how close together intervals are, separated by a mere second or two!)

That doesn't seem like much progress, but it absolutely thrilled me to get under 2:00!  Gone are the days (perhaps forever) of running 1:30 and 1:40, as I did only a few years ago.  But 2:00 - an 8-minute mile - is respectable at my age, I like to think.

So I guess that's why we like tracking our progress so much:  we want to be able to recognize and record those little bursts of progress that occur in defiance of the long eventual decline of simply getting old.