Look how far I've come - aka - why you should keep a training journal!

Today's schedule called for an 8 mile run which gave me plenty of time to think.  Fortunately the sun was shining (a rarity in Michigan) and it was over 10 degrees (another rarity of late) so I decided to head outside and run on the White Pine Trail.  I had a great run, though I am struggling to nail down the feel for my desired 25k race pace (9:40).  My splits started out in the 10:05 - 10:13 range for the first few miles and then got progressively faster with a final mile of 9:09.  It's hard to really judge effort and pace considering the conditions (packed snow and ice) but I'm happy with where I'm at.  I started thinking about how far I've come over the past few years and decided to pull out my training journal (Garmin Connect) to see actual data.

While training for the 2012 River Bank Run my schedule first called for 8 miles on April 1st with a total of 17 miles for the week.  At that time (a nice day with no snow on the ground) it took me 1:34 (11:44 per mile pace).  Back then I was so exhausted after my weekly long run that I was worthless for the rest of the day... something I'm sure my wife would agree with.

Today's 8 mile run took 1:17 for a 9:44 pace in cold weather on packed snow. I will run approximately 20 miles this week but will also swim for almost 3 hours and bike for another 3 - 3.5 hours.  In total I will complete 11 workouts this week taking somewhere between 9 and 10 hours.  Perhaps most important, I still have energy to do things with my family that don't involve sitting on the couch for the rest of the day.

It's easy to become discouraged after a bad training day, which is why I recommend that everyone keep a training journal.  It can be digital or old school pen and paper... it doesn't matter as long as you have a way to objectively measure your improvement over time.  It's amazing to see how much progress I've made in the past few years, despite taking almost 2 years off in between.  Of course that leads to the obvious question, how awesome could I be if I had actually stuck with a consistent training program for that length of time?!?