I Need To Get Faster

This post is mostly an excuse to use Swivel, a web site that produces graphs of data sets. I uploaded my running log to it. Here's a graph of my pace over the last few years.



Other than a few anomalous outliers on the high side, the data is pretty closely clustered around an average value of 7:45/mile. There are sections, if you had the data at hand, where i've average quite a bit faster (like when i was training for Carlsbad), but the historical trend is pretty flat. This graph is a bit more encouraging:



This makes it clearer that a fair proportion of my runs have been considerably below the average if you factor in the distance of the run. Nonetheless, i need to get faster. My 2008 goals will include setting PRs at most of my race distances, especially on the shorter end. I'm gonna be ambitious and shoot for 17:30 at 5k and 36:00 at 10k. My training approach is going to be very complex and sophisticated: run faster. I'm going to focus on more speed training and trying to keep my regular runs closer to 7min/mile.