Chasing Eight

For those of you who associate with me on Facebook, you will have noticed that the majority of my posts there are running workouts. This is because I have been using a utility for keeping track of my running and it posts each run to FB.

The utility calculates the minutes per mile for each run as well as giving me an average pace for each week and for the year. The average has been in the low eights all year because while most workouts are done just under eight minutes per mile, there are a lot of really long runs early in the year when I am doing marathon training. Naturally, one cannot expect to put out the same level of intensity for a 21 miler as for five and a half miles, so the average is low early in the year, but then after the marathon is over I focus on speed.

So I have slowly seen the average for the year dwindle from around 8:10 or so down to 8:01 but then the utility I've been using went defunct! So, I went to the website of the utility and it allowed me to download all the data. It took some doing to get it all into a format Excel could digest, but then hey presto! The pace was like 7:40! Not really though. Some of the times were off because I had a bunch of entries that were one hour, no minutes and some seconds and it just truncated out the minutes, so an hour and 20 seconds would show as one minute and twenty seconds. So I fixed all of that and took out the two bike rides and (drum roll) it is still under eight! 7:58/mile for the year on a total of 1,103.17 miles.