Milestone

I have a nice little 4 mile loop that's become my running course of choice. One of the advantages to this particular neighborhood for running is that there's lots of cross streets, giving me a lot of options on how I want to run the miles, and thus a feeling of variety even though it's the same old neighborhood. So today I planned to run 7 miles, no big whoop, but after looking at my log I realized that if I ran 8 miles I would make a milestone of sorts-more on that later. I thought about this for 2 miles, whether to just do the 7 or add a mile. I was coming to a point in the run where I would make a choice-go straight ahead and commit to 8 miles or turn right and call it at 7. So there I am, at the cross street, and I decided what the heck-go for it. I went straight and finished 8 miles.

And now, you ask-what was the milestone? Well, I'm pretty close to completing 1000 miles this year. And by running 8 miles instead of 7, I can report that my mileage for the year as of today is......950.3 miles! Yep, by adding just one little mile, I have a nice round number to report. I don't know what it is about us runners, but we seem to have an obssession with round numbers. We want to run 30 miles per week-29 won't do, and if we're up to 31, we want 40. A 10 mile run is much more satisfying that 9 even though it's only one more mile.

So, 50 miles to go, and almost a month to complete it. Should be a piece of cake!