My One Hundred Thousandth Mile

My one hundred thousandth mile occurred, fittingly, during a marathon. The race was the Veterans Marathon in Pennsylvania. I thought I'd planned it out such that mile 100,000 would occur during the final mile of this, my 109th marathon, and my 145th race of marathon length or longer. I didn't realize until I got home that this wasn't the case; I'd reached 100K at about mile 16. The rest was gravy.

Today's 16th and 26th miles were probably not so much different from my first documented mile in 1978. Back then, I was training for my first marathon. But I suppose that my training miles were at around eight-minute-per-mile (or perhaps a bit slower) pace, whereas today's all-out marathon pace, including miles 16 and 26, was at about 8:39 pace. Okay, maybe mile 26 was just a hair faster.

Being the numbers guy that I am, I've counted all the miles I've run since 1978. I ran some before that, and I also ran during the 'lost year' of 1980. But since I don't have documentation on those, I am not counting them. Here's the list of my year-by-year mileage:

I should mention that I've had the honor of knowing and running with some amazing people who have accomplished nearly unbelievable things. Many are great ultrarunners, and many of them have surely run at least as much as I have over their lifetimes. But a lot of them are not quite crazy enough to want to keep track of things like this. Maybe they have better things to do.

Anyway, here are some fun facts with these numbers:

• The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles, so I've gone around over four times.
• The distance from the earth to the moon is 238,900 miles, so I've gone 41,8 percent of the way there.
• The distance from the earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles, so I've only gone 0.108 percent of the way there.
• 100,000 miles over 41 years is an average of 2,439 miles per year.
• 100,000 miles in 41 years is an average of 6.68 per day (I'd get better averages if it weren't for some of those 'slacker' years.)
• The average pace has slowed a little. Actually, it's slowed a lot over the last few years. Interesting that the mileage hasn't dropped, however.

Okay, that's enough now. Maybe it's time to quit. You know, hang up the old Hokas.

Naaah. I'm still gonna try for the moon. Is there another way to become the Greatest Runner Who Ever Lived?