With a double digit afternoon run added to my data, the big 1,000 has been hit! That’s 1,000 miles of running in the bag for the year and my shins have felt every step of it so far. The joys of being a runner they say.

Getting the second half of the year into 25+ miles a week definitely helped speed up amount of miles. If I broke the months down into two five month portions, I covered 100 more miles in the last five months than the first five months of the year. That means that I did somehow commit to more mileage and I have to give a shoutout to your averagerunnerpaul for actually sticking to a marathon plan so far too! What a crazy world this is.

As for my big-to-me run to top the 1,000 mile mark, I managed to cover 11.1 miles and climb 2,220 feet. Too bad I didn’t hit two more feet for a nice 2-2-2-2 pattern. On the bright side, this was my highest elevation gain ever in one go! It beat my previous mark by 100 feet.

Some long-term readers know that I am making a tentative plan to climb the height of Mount Everest on a local Texas hill. That’s a total gain of over 29,000 feet of climbing so as you can see, I have a ways to go. With my latest trek of the ‘Howdy Hill of Death’, I have now managed to get 7.5% of the way completed towards my Everest goal. AKA – not even close. Additionally, the math indicates that it would take me about 146 miles to cover that elevation too. I may need to find a different elevation plan because that is a lotta miles…

How’s the Body?

Overall, not too shabby. I definitely battled a few injuries throughout the year to get here. I had a stress fracture carry over from the end of 2024 which meant a slower build up in January. Hitting 30 miles a week took a few attempts before the body was more consistent with being able to handle the workload. Lots of icing took place and some manflu like complaining to my wife as I iced the shins. I finally have gotten the consistency down for that mileage with two months to go so that is progress!

Year end goal?

Keep building up mileage to shoot for a quality marathon finish on December 20th! It was one of my first yearly running goals back in March so hopefully I can check that one off the list. A quality finish means not losing my breakfast at the end or walking more than I plan too. A finish time around 3:30ish would be pretty spectacular too. We shall see what happens!

Hope y’all had a fantastic week of running and stay healthy!