Do I get to call myself a runner again?

It has been a down year as far as running goes. There is no secret there. My passport will be stamped for it's 18th time this year in a few hours so I can make excuses about jetlag or about being too busy to run when traveling for work but the excuses don't matter. Neither my statistics nor my fitness care why I haven't been running. It is November first and I have less than 1000 miles Year-to-Date. I have only run 134 days this year.

When October ended about 5 hours ago, my log had 133.42 miles in it for the month. That is a bit more than my global mean monthly mileage of 115.89 miles (since I started keeping a log in December 2009) but well short of last year's 155.86 mile/month average. Perhaps the most depressing statistic about my mileage is that 133.42 miles in October makes last month my second highest mileage month of the year. In no other year would so few miles be in one of my top two months.

Now the good news? 101.85 of those miles came in the last 15 days of the month. My legs are sore for the first time since early 2012 when I started ramping my mileage up after a long winter of working too may hours out near Albany.

I'm not going to make any promises about cracking a 200 mile month for the first time since 2013 but I am finally feeling optimistic about running again. Crazy though my schedule is when traveling in Korea, I have packed enough running gear to run every day on this trip. What is my giant, unreasonable goal which I will fail at? I'm going to try to get my Korea mileage up over my New York state mileage. Here's how my top 10 locations in terms of miles run stack up:

Never say my running log doesn't have enough useless information in it.

I'll need to run about 13 miles per day to hit that goal. So doubles? If I can hit that goal, the goal of 200+ miles in November should be easy and set a good base going into Boston training.

Cheers!