I started this blog months ago but haven’t known where to start.  I kept feeling like I have to fill in every detail of every aspect of beginner-older-person running before I post my first post.  Then I decided that that was ridiculous and that I should just write about where I am at the moment and the rest will fall into place.  So I’m writing my first post on the day of the two-year anniversary of my starting running – well, starting with the first run logged in the MapMyRun app, which I think includes all but my first five or six runs before I found the app. 

So why is this post titled “600 Miles!!”?  I have done enough Googling on running subjects that I knew running shoes should be replaced after some number of miles.   I have had my shoes for two years, wearing them in the snow, in rain, with cleats over the ice, and the tread is wearing off on the bottom, so I was getting the feeling that I might be overdue for a new pair.  This page  and others are pretty much in agreement that 500 miles is a maximum.  But how to know how many miles I’ve run?

I started poking around in the MapMyRun app and found that the Profile screen, accessible from the three-dots option at the bottom of the screen, gives you all kinds of cumulative stats.  I never knew all this information was being added up before!  66,600 calories!

 Up at the very top you can see total miles is 603.4!  (And lower down you can see that over half of that, 334.6 miles, is from 2018.)  Yes, it is definitely time to buy new sneakers.  (And if you look at that bar chart, it’s not too surprising that I started losing weight a LOT faster starting in May, where the number of miles goes up dramatically – more on that in a later post.)

So for today I’ll just leave it at the fact that it’s my two-year anniversary of starting running as a geezer (that’s the term my brother Paul would use – does that term apply to women?), I’ve gone over 600 miles, lost 18 pounds so far, gotten rid of high blood pressure entirely, become a lot stronger, feel fantastic, and have run in two 5Ks and not come in last in either (yeah, there were little kids in the “fun runs”).  And I’ll make my next post about picking out the replacement shoes so that I can continue this journey.