Running gains made visual

The only thing that matters running-wise to me these days is preparing for my first race in nearly a year while also regaining some of my running swagger. It's been a long road back from injury and it seems like I make progress in very small increments, so I attempted to quantify my gains.

I've not run as little as three miles in about a week, but for the four runs for which I have data, this is how they've gone:


In the span of a couple weeks or so I've gotten about 14 seconds or so per mile faster. That's pretty good, I guess.

But how am I doing overall? Here are all the runs for which I have data between January 17 and February 9:


There were several outdoor runs of about 3.5 miles for which I have no hard data because I went out Garmin-less. They were tough runs and would have made this chart look less impressive than I think it does.
Some of this data is misleading and overall it's not a very good representation of how I'm doing. For example, there were two 5 mile runs, one on January 29 and another on February 1, where the average paces were significantly different. The first 5 miler was a Sunday long run and the second was a speed work day. However, if you notice the average pace of the 5 miler on January 29 and the 6 miler on February 5, well there you see some progress.

I only put this information out there to let people know that there is life after injury, and there is progress after injury. It takes a while and seems to go a lot slower than you might imagine, but there's there and it's quantifiable.

If you don't care about regaining speed and endurance post-injury, here's an infographic to help educate you and your friends on the best ways and reasons to start a new fitness routine and how to start one. But you probably can't read it so view it in blown up form here:


Happy running!