Real David H.

For the past few years, October has been about winding down. It’s been more about ending something rather than starting something.

This year, though, it’s been all about a change of pace, quite literally. With this being the first full month of being a father of two, all I was really striving for was making sure I ran 3 or 4 times a week for 30-40 minutes. If I had it in me, go for 10 miles or so on the weekends.

It turns out this extremely loose plan with no major goals was exactly what I needed to make this October completely different than previous years. And the more removed I am from the Runner’s World Festival weekend, the more I realize how important those few days really were to me.

A few things about this month:

• I ran 78 miles, the fourth month in a row of increased mileage since a really low mileage month in June.
• My combined running and biking mileage was more than 100 miles for the third straight month.
• My streak of running 1,000 miles in a calendar year will end, but in November I’ll still cross a combined 1,000 exercise miles for the year. I’ll take it.
• I lost 3 pounds of my “baby weight.” September and early October were a bit rough with everything that involved eating. I got things under better control in the past few weeks and feel much better because of that. I’m back to 30 overall pounds lost since early 2004 and I feel a stronger desire than usual to get to my original 40 lost before the end of the year. I can’t obsess about it, but I can certainly stay on this path.
• After writing about setting a goal of a PR in the 10-miler, I realized I need to actually run at and below that goal pace. A renewed effort with speed work started this week by including 2 miles on the treadmill at 15:21. That, too, is a path to stay on with more and longer speed work.

Now it’s on to November. No major goals other than to build on October.

Let’s go …