100 km/week obsession

I have quite a few metrics on my running dashboard but this one in the top 3. And it has become quite an obsession the past years. On a daily basis, I track the distance to this average and feel bad when I'm too far behind. As a matter of fact, I should feel equally bad when I'm getting too far ahead because it's usually when my body is calling for a break or slow down. For instance I was 400 kilometers ahead after the 24-hour Nationals in September but lost all of the buffer as I had to take 6 weeks off running to let the sesamoidis heal. It's actually a tricky exercise to manage this average as I've also been trying to follow Scott Jurek's tip of resting for 3 to 4 weeks between the seasons. To meet the two goals, I need this 300-400-kilometer buffer before the break.

Here we are, getting to the end of the year, and I'm pretty close but slightly behind. To make the matter worse, it is a leap year so I need an extra 14.3 kilometers for a total of 81.84 kilometers to be run by the end of New Year's Eve. I was going to enter the 12-hour event at Coastal Trail Runs' New Year One Day but the family wasn't found at all about a repeat of the 2012 New Year's Eve, so we settled for the 6-hour format, from noon to 6 pm this Saturday (you may follow my progress, live, at http://www.coastaltrailruns.com/nyod_new_year_one_day.html#). At lest, if I don't manage to cover 51 miles in 6 hours, which is rather aggressive, I can always do a few more laps to cool down... In other words, I need to run 49 laps tomorrow at Crissy Field to satisfy my obsession. One more time, as I'm seriously thinking of dropping this weekly average goal next year as I have the feeling it has become too aggressive as a volume for my body now.

It's always hard to let go of a goal, and especially a symbolic threshold like this one, but I already feel blessed to have been reaching this 3,200 mile/year milestone for the past 6 years. I know many can't log as many miles, for various reasons like the lack of time, other priorities or constraints, health condition or fitness level.

That leaves me with 80 miles to reach the New Year, see you there in a few miles!

PS: by the way, not only did we have one additional day this leap year but did you know we were also getting one additional second to make up for some approximation in the calculation of our orbit around the sun. Read more about this rare phenomenon from National Geographic or NPR. The fact that the last minute of 2016 will be 61-second long is rather interesting from a computing standpoint...