On December 31, runners and non-runners alike often review what they have accomplished in the past year. Now that Martha and I are both in our seventh decade, we are focusing more and more on a healthy lifestyle for the duration, which involves not just daily exercise but a good diet, good relationships, managing stress, and many other factors. As a wise man has said (the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, as far as I can determine), “The goal is to die young as late as possible.” We should be more focused on a health-span rather than a life-span.
But since this is ostensibly a blog about running, I will
limit 2025 to that one activity, which for me is the cornerstone of my fitness.
Like many runners, I am an obsessive
record-keeper, and I maintain not only a spreadsheet of all of my races over
the years (220 so far), but a daily running log. My own running log is recorded in a weekly “At-a-Glance”
diary that I started 30 years ago, in 1995.
(I ran quite a few miles before then, but I didn’t record them.) It has become more and more difficult to find
this specific ancient spiral-bound diary since most runners now keep their running logs on various
devices and apps. But I have not yet gone paperless, and I
stubbornly cling to my faithful running log, in which I enter my daily mileage,
a description of the running workout I completed, my daily weight, and other
exercise statistics.
There they are, 30 running logs arranged in order on a shelf in my study. If I want to take a trip down Memory Lane I can choose one at random and be surprised at the kinds of workouts I once completed - long runs exceeding a week of running these days, mile repeats, tempo runs, hill climbs.
I record my mileage at the end of each week and at the end of each year. This year I ran only 315 miles, the fewest miles I have recorded in a humble career that recorded 1,578 miles in a single year back in 2005, and a lifetime mileage of 33,626. I had a few non-running injuries this year, but the end of the year is no time for excuses. It’s time for looking ahead, making new resolutions, and being optimistic. And that overall mileage number sometimes astounds me – it’s much farther than the earth’s circumference. But as any runner can tell you, it is not very large in comparison with that of an elite distance runner.
A line graph of the data looks like this:
It it is only natural that each decade has found me running fewer and fewer miles. And I am sure that line will continue heading in the same direction. I am older and I am also slower - a graph of my finish times would look the same. As I have recounted in this blog in the past, I once lamented to a fellow septuagenarian runner while waiting for race results, “The older I get, the faster I was!” His immediate reply was a good once: “Yes, but you're still the runner that you are, right now!”
So today I will write 2026 on the cover of my new running log and turn ambitiously to the first page. I have not run since Saturday because temperatures have been in the low twenties and wind chills in the teens and single digits in Highlands. But I will run tomorrow, one way or another, and fill in that first blank page in a brand new year.
