13 Years of Running and a lot of miles

Day 259 - September 16, 2009

According to my running log, I have now run over 14,000 miles in my lifetime. I'm pretty anal when it comes to my record keeping and I have running logs for 13 different years from 1990 - 2009 where I've recorded my times and distances. From 1992-1998, college and grad school got in the way of my running and I didn't run enough to bother logging my mileage. I doubt I ran 50 miles in those 6 years, so I don't count those years. I also know that I didn't log my miles the first year I ran in high school, which was 1989, but I doubt that amounted to even 400 miles in the 4 months of training.

Being a perspective guy, I needed some frame of reference for what 14,000 miles equates to. The first thing I thought of was in relation to the Earth's circumference. That was cool and all, but I'm no where near the 29,000 miles needed to get around the equator. But I could start in Moscow, run due east on the 56th parallel and end up where I started. That's pretty cool, but kind of like saying you can run all the way around the earth in less than 5 minutes when you are at the north pole.

Then I got the idea, what about the moon. I had no idea what the circumference of the moon was, so I Googled, and wikipedia had my answer. It turns out the distance around the moon is 6,786 miles. My 14,000 miles is enough to run all the way around the moon, TWICE!! That sounds way more awesome. So, that's what I'll be telling my friends tomorrow. I think they'll be really impressed - or they may just think I'm a bigger dork than they previously realized.

Either way, I think it is pretty cool that I can say I've run 14000 miles lifetime and I look forward to getting to 15000 in another 9 months or so. If you have the records, check and see what your lifetime totals are and let me know what that equates to. Then drop me a comment - I'd love to see what everyone has done.