As I gear up for my 6th half marathon, I’m really at the end of my third half marathon training season, and my 3rd opportunity to race the Chilly Half Marathon.
I thought it would be neat to look back at previous years training, and check out the mileage I ran in preparation for each race.
The great news is that I’ve run more miles in the 3 months prior to the Chilly Half Marathon this year, the crazy news is that I run a lot fewer miles to train for any of these half marathons than I thought!
Despite the best of intentions, I often miss training runs. I have two preschoolers (well, now I do – my first year of training the littlest one wasn’t even in school!) and sometimes they’re sick, or they get me sick, or, well, am I really giving you a run-down of training excuses? Really? You deserve better than that.
Point is, I miss runs. More than I thought. My training plans had me running an average of 20-30… I actually ran around 16 miles per week this year, and even fewer miles per week in previous years. Looking at my numbers, I know there are some missed treadmill runs in there, but not enough to make a substantial difference.
Some of those were weeks where I was sick or had overall soreness from adjusting to strength training, so most weeks were either low mileage, or around 20-25. Even my best month, September, when I had two weeks where I ran over 30 miles averaged only 21.5 miles per week.
Evidently you can train to complete a half marathon running fewer than 20 miles a week! Hello efficiency.
That said, I’d love to see my mileage higher next year, because I think the more you prepare, the better your race goes; not just your performance, but the race experience.
Most training plans for half marathons recommend averaging 20-30 miles per week during training, and anyone with a performance goal usually runs substantially more than that.
Looking ahead: I love knowing this. This is a great reality check for me, a great reminder that I’m still lucky to have found time to run the miles I did and make it to the starting line of another half marathon. This means that going forward there’s great potential for improvement, because even with my more serious effort this year, I’m still racking in very low numbers for mileage. Next year is another chance to try again.
One of these years, I’m actually going to train properly for this thing 😉
That’s a significant difference compared to the last two years, and I believe it will pay off on race day! I also hate not seeing my treadmill runs on my Garmin Connect account, so I add them manually. 🙂
I hope you’re right! It has to pay off at least somewhat, right?! I used to enter my treadmill runs in manually, but I was doing it into Strava and not Garmin Connect, but Connect has better reporting… I might have to rethink it. I go back and forth on whether to really keep track, but there are times when it’s very fun to track annual progress.