Around the world: once!

No, I am not talking about flying around the world. With more than 1.4 million air miles, I already did that several times and have enough carbon foot print to be ashamed of. This Sunday, I completed my 2,210th run in my log and the total distance is 24,910 miles (40,088 km), that is 8 miles more than the circumference of the Earth at the equator! Sincerely, this is not a milestone or a goal that I set when I started running. By the way that's what I have in my log which I started in 1996, on and off first, then very consistently when I moved to California at the end of 1998 and started training for my first marathon. That does not include a few races which I ran in the 1990s, nor the miles when I was running cross-country in middle school, but mostly the distance I ran over the past 12 years.

This corresponds to 3,216 hours or 134 days non stop, quite a hobby... Thankfully, without all the logistic of actually traveling around the world or even walking on water to cross the oceans (see how there is mostly water at the equator)!!

As I run more now with my ultra running and ultra training, if all goes well, it is not going to take me another decade to do another rotation around the blue planet. In the meantime, I did 52 laps on the track on Saturday in 1:17:58, that is a half marathon at 5:59 min/mile pace, in preparation of the upcoming 50K race of Jed Smith. My GPS got so dizzy trying to keep track of these ovals that it indicated 13.8 miles at the end and a 5:37 min/mile pace, but I know I was not that fast. And that I got the lap count right. And that I did not cut corners or changed line despite what the maps shows...

It is Spring in the Bay Area these days with temperatures between 60 and 65F during the day. Thinking of all of you training and logging miles in the cold with a real winter...