This past weekend I ran in the Jay’s Hope 5K.  My time wasn’t near my best, but I was happy with it considering all of the physical therapy that I’ve been doing and the continuing pain that I have.  But I started wondering how this run compared to some of my official runs and I did what any fun-loving number nerd would do.  I graphed it!

5ks

While I don’t have a lot of data points, I think that you can see that in the past two years, I have gotten a bit slower.  This was a little troubling to me and I needed more data.  Luckily, I have my GPS watch with tons of information waiting to be gleaned.  Here are my average mile paces for all of my workout runs included:

all-runs

Wow.  Those are a lot of dots.  What does this mean?  Here’s what I get from it:

  • The trend indicates that my workout runs are getting slower as time passes.
  • I am no longer concerned about my official 5K times anymore.
  • I should only run in official races from now on.
  • Extrapolating to the right, it will take me 20 minutes to run a mile when I’m 40.
  • Extrapolating to the left, I could run 3 minute miles when I was 15.

So there are the statistics for you.  I don’t make them up, I just run them.  Except for the next few weeks when I’ll complain about my shins hurting.  And then I’ll start back running again, but at an even slower pace.  But it’s OK because it’s what the data says to do.