Forums >General Running>PR Question
I don't get it. If you're not competitive, then why do you care how fast you are, or how much you've improved? I also don't get the idea of never wanting to sign up for a race.
I don't get the idea of wanting to use my phone to text either.
The process is the goal.
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.
PRs being focused on races probably evolved from races having accurate time / distance stats. It is only recently that we all starting running with GPS data loggers and wearing jet packs to commute. Before, races are where you knew there was an accurate time and accurate distance. There's no "rule" that only a race time can be your PR..
There has to be a way of sorting out which runs ought to count for PR's and which won't. Otherwise every single distance you ever ran would be listed under your PR's: 2.3 miles, 2.4 miles, 3.4 miles, 3.6 miles... etc. even if you did not give your best effort. Since most of us call giving our best effort "racing", the log automatically chooses only races to count as PR's.
One question, anutherfinemess -- on your PR's, are they all-out efforts? Because regardless of venue, a PR should really be the fastest you've ever run a given distance, going all-out. And my example notwithstanding, you're almost always gonna run faster in a race than in any solo run. Racing is the best way to see how fast you really are, regardless of you perform against the field.
It works better than the toaster oven?
Lazy idiot
I am extremely competitive. Too competitive. I care very much about how much I improve, and how fast I am is merely one way of measuring that. Because I choose to compete with myself rather than compete with you changes nothing.
Tick tock
an amazing likeness
and the GPS "distances" can be off quite a bit depending on a number of factors. Wear it on the track and find out how accurate it is or isn't
Acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.
I've got a fever...
To answer your question, no. They were not "all out". They were simply faster than I had ever them before. But now you are offering yet another definition of PR.
On your deathbed, you won't wish that you'd spent more time at the office. But you will wish that you'd spent more time running. Because if you had, you wouldn't be on your deathbed.
Why is it sideways?
Yet, if I go out tomorrow and run a 5k in 27:00 the only way that I can log that in a way so that I see 27:00 as my personal record is to log it as a race. Why? Last year it didn't really bother me to do this but I am taking a much more mindful approach to my running this year and would like to be able to log a run by the type it was so that I can generate reports properly rather than taking various runs and putting them under a mythical race category.
I truly regret mentioning logging at all as it is just an annoyance that I can work around.
2013
3000 miles
Sub 19:00 for 5K 05-03-13 Clee Prom 5K - 19:00:66 that was bloody close!
Sub-40:00 for 10K 17-03-13 Gainsborough 10K - 39:43
Sub 88:00 for HM
I dunno man, for a guy that doesn't care what other people think and who only competes with himself, you sure have put a lot of thought into what other people think about their running. Interpret your running how you like. For those of us who do not PR in random workouts and whose PRs represent one triumph that stands out over a lifetime of struggle, failure, half-successes, and heartbreaking injuries most of your questions are pretty moot.
Runners run
MTA: I will ask again what I asked before. If I took a poll and asked everyone here how much you can bench press, or how many push ups you can do in one minute, or how high you can jump, whatever.... at some point you would almost certainly have an answer to one of those questions. You would say "I can bench 225" or "I benched 300 2 years ago but I couldn't do that now" or "I can do fifty push ups in one minute". Those are all PRs of yours. In your mind you know exactly what your PR is because it is your best performance. But how many of those were set in competitions?