Proposing runners to switch from recording miles to recording minutes
A few weeks ago I had a column about a book I found in my old storage cabinet that had a woman running down the road reading a book on running. The caption was, “Marilyn tried hard to understand her new sport’s language: 10K; 43:20; 5K; pronate tapering; peaking; lateral stability; shin splints; and cross training.” Almost any sport or occupation has a language that defines what you do. Think of people knowledgeable in computer science; being a carpenter building a house, a mechanic working on a big motor, or an electrician or plumber. Each of these occupations has their own language. In sports basketball, football, baseball, track, soccer, and even golf has terms used in that sport. Why does tennis use the words ”Love,” “Ad In,” and “Deuce,” for a score? How many people understand the hand signals the third base coach is using in baseball? And golf has ‘birdies’ and ‘eagles’ and ‘bogeys’.
Runners have a language that takes some time to learn. One of the most uncommon words is ‘fartlek’ as a training method. Even a number of runners don’t know the meaning of the word. The most common use by runners is how they tell other people how far they ran. Ask a runner how much he or she ran and they invariably will say they averaged so many miles day, or have run so many miles this week, or even how many miles they ran in a year. They record this distance in their log books to refer back to training and any improvements that have been made. I was a much to blame on this recording as runner when I managed to run a total of 2,300 miles one year. It was a milestone for me and there are some runners that manage to run many more miles.
My purpose for this article is to add a method of recording the distance a runner has accomplished to add to the confusion in a language. Instead of recording the number of miles you ran you put down how many minutes or hours you ran. In races runners don’t necessarily put down the miles of a 5K race but what their time was. Why not do this same thing with all your runs?
When a person asks you how much you run you give them an answer like, “Oh, I ran five hours last week but it took me over a month to run a whole day. I ran a little over a week for the year.” Now that makes sense doesn’t it? A whole day is equal to 24 hours and running for that amount of time means you are serious about your training.
Say you average 30 minutes of running every day of the year. One day has 1440 minutes and if you care to check a year has 525,600 minutes. Breaking that down to more understandable measurements it will take you 48 days to run one whole day. And if anyone cares to try it will take you 48 years to run one whole year.
Switching over from miles to minutes wouldn’t be that difficult since you already count minutes when you race and all you would do is continue that system of measuring with your everyday work out. And think of the side benefit of this system is the time you will save by not having to get into the car and driving a new route every time to find out how many miles you ran.
I offer a suggestion on the time keeping though – round the times to minutes or hours, do not get lost in record keeping for seconds, tenths or hundredths of a second. It just makes the addition of time unbelievably hard. If the world of running can go to metric measurement for races, runners can go to minutes of running.
The most difficult time you will have is explaining your running in days or weeks instead of miles. It is hard enough for a non-runner to comprehend running 26.2 miles in a marathon and trying to visualize that in distance. They try to visualize you running to Austin from San Marcos and cannot imagine that anyone could do that in one day. Now when you tell them you are running for a week each year the confused look on their face will be worth the effort to record times instead of miles in your log book.
