Afternoon Run - 9km (and time to rethink my goals)

dannewton just finished a 9.26km run, that lasted for 65 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 718.0 calories.

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Description from Strava: So once again its Wednesday, and that means like the last 4 weeks in a row, its time for another slow easy mid-week run

I'm a sucker for routine, can you tell?!

And it's so good to back some sort of routine you know? I've really missed it due the whole business with getting injured etc. And you can really see it in the graphs below. One of the perks of being a subscriber of Strava is the ability to create goals. I set my self a target of running 40km each week, which is a reasonable distance but one I will be looking to increase over time.

In the graph below you can see the distances I've run over the past few weeks, and if you can see the grey circles at the top of each line is the 40km mark, then you can see just how rubbish its been.

In June I barely ran at all, and only in the 2nd part of July did I finally mage to get outside and running again. The last 2 weeks I almost managed 40km, with 37km and and 34km respectively, and I think this week I am now on track to finally hit 40km

The 2nd graph shows a similar story, but instead of 40km per week, it shows a target of 160km per month:

As this graph goes further back in time, its even more obvious showing what I was doing at the start of the year, through the frustrating Summer period and finally getting back into full swing.

I ran the marathon at the end of March. There were a couple of recovery runs in April before the injury took place. May and June were a complete write off, and only in July was I finally on the path to recovery. We are now at the end of August, and after completing 137km this month I can finally say I'm now 'injury free'

I better not have jinxed it!

And that now brings me to the last graph. My goal for the year was to run 2023km in 2023, just cos it had a nice ring to it lol!

It was something to aim for, to keep me motivated for the year. In fact the reason I plumped for 40km as a weekly target was that if I multiply 40km by 52 weeks, I end up with a total of 2080km. If I was consistent then it should relatively easy.

At the stat of the year I was easily managing over 40km per week and up to 55km a couple of times. The grey straight line shows the minimum I would need to reach throughout the year, and for January and February I was comfortably above the line. Then the injury appeared and the weeks fell off!

Im just getting going now, but there is no way I will be able to catch up to achieve the 1212km needed to reach. In the last 17 weeks of this year I would need to average over 70km per week. While I am aiming for those sorts of distances eventually, it is well out of my reach for now.

Because of the 2023 goal is now unattainable, I now need a new goal, one that considers my lack of training over the summer and still feels like a reasonable target

In the end I went for 1500km. Its a nice round number, and is still a significant distance to aim for, as I ran just over 1000km in 2022.

More importantly, I have 17 weeks to cover the 689km needed to reach the lower 1500km target, which is approximately 40.5km per week. This is much more achievable AND will help to keep me focused in maintaining my training over the last 4 months of this year.

And with that in mind, I will reset my weekly goal to be 41km, just to remind me of what I am aiming for this year.

With 18.5km covered so far this week, with another 6km scheduled tomorrow. That will leave me 16.5km needed as part of my long run on Saturday to reach my goal this week... and I guess you'll have to check back in on Saturday to see if I make it!

to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how many people actually read all this. Some of the users here only post a couple of sentences as part of their posts, but I always feel obligated to try and write something worth reading. I know a 'running blog' isn't overly exciting for many people, but I enjoy writing it, and really enjoy doing all the running so I'll still post regularly about it all anyway!

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If you would like to check out this activity on strava you can see it here:
https://www.strava.com/activities/9750723401

About the Athlete: Living in the UK, I am an intermittent Runner, but always striving for more consistency. When I'm not training I can be found photographing insects or listening to really loud angry music (which is the best type of music obviously!)

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