200

Remember a long time ago when I ran 100 miles? Well, apparently when I went running last week, I finally broke the 200 mile mark! The first 100 miles took me about a month and a half. The next 100 took over 5 months. Why the big difference? Here's why...

1) Well, there was a stretch where everyone in the house got sick, and I didn't run for a few weeks in a row.

2) I changed my goals. Actually, I really didn't have many goals before. I just wanted to run. Now, I have a good reason for running. I'm really just trying to stay healthy and to help strengthen my legs a little for basketball. I don't need to run 5 miles a day, every day to do that. If I was training for an event, like a distance race or something, it would be different. But I'm not. My routine now is a 5km run 2 or 3 times per week. That's it.

3) I had to stop doing challenges. I'm too competitive. When I got involved in a challenge, I was focusing too much energy on it. It took a lot out of me. I would run even when I was sick or it there was freezing cold rain. No more of that. When I do things like that, it makes it not so fun. And when it's not so fun, there's a bigger chance that I won't keep it up long term. As a result, now if the weather's too yucky, I won't go run. I'll do something else instead.

4) I put running at a lower priority. When I was doing the challenges, I had to make sure that I ran every day (sometimes twice). So I was spending about an hour a day doing that. Now I use that time for other things that I think are more important.

5) I changed my workout style a bit. I'm trying to run faster now, rather than longer. Since my workout distance is constant (5km), I can increase the difficulty by bumping my pace up a bit. I feel like this gives my leg muscles a better workout than running a longer distance at a slower pace. Before, I was running at around 9 minutes per mile. Now, I'm running at about an 8:30 pace. I also sometimes do interval workouts where I run fast for a little while, then slow down, then fast, then slow. I've never been a distance runner before, so this type of workout is more enjoyable for me.

So we'll see how long it'll take me to get to 300. Should be faster now that the weather's getting nicer. My guess is about 3 months.