Greetings, runners! Please tell us about your past training week and upcoming goals.

Alexander - looks like you're ramping up the miles again.  Nice weather, indeed.  Are you running Boston this spring?

My big news is I ran a "5k" trail race on Saturday with a small field (19 runners) and I actually won.  I'd never won a race before, so I was quite thrilled.  Race report is here.  (I don't always write reports for 5k races, but this one was special for me.)

I hit another milestone this week, topping 350 hours of running for the year, thanks in no small part to the marathon training.  That's 9 hours more than my previous annual mark and I still have two weeks to go.  I don't anticipate hitting that figure next year or any time soon.  31 miles for the week.

And I'm on the same team as Fred for next year! The game sure has dwindled. I agree, Paul, that we may not see another year of this year although it appears they are taking some of the suggestions to hopefully make some structural changes next year. I think a huge obstacle to others joining is the year long commitment. Granted many team are out by the beginning of Dec BUT if you are not it can be difficult to not only maintain but increase your momentum.  And since they've expanded the admin team, maybe that will breathe some new life and enthusiasm into the game. But overall, general participation in RA is comparatively small compared to years past and you can only garner so much participation from a smaller RA forum. 

Last week was another "hardly running" week for me.  Just kind of coasting through the rest of the year with running, or not running, as much as I want. Next year, and particularly the first half of the year will be on the higher end of mileage for me.

Tues: 6 miles

Wed: 5.3 miles

Fri: 4.6 miles

total: 15.9

Fred, congratulations on the 1st overall !! Moments like this make all this training and racing really worth it. And, yes, 350 total hours for the year basically means nearly a full hour of daily running, every single day. I think these two big milestones very nicely complement each other, one is impossible without the other one. Yes, I signed up for next year Boston, I got a BQ at this year's Boston and that was enough to get in.

Quickadder, congratulations on reaching the target for the year! And congratulations on the 200% week! Interesting about your planned marathon training. Usually, most runners train at paces that are much slower than the goal marathon pace. Like, 1-2 or even 3 minutes per mile slower. The fact that you are consistently running faster might indicate that you could target a somewhat faster pace in the marathon, but that is entirely your call of course and it would depend on how your long runs would go. And yes! Looks like we are going to be on the same team in 2024, looking forward to it !

Tammy, three runs is three runs and it makes a lot of sense to cut back a bit after such a long effort. I think historically RA originated on the Runner's World website, when it had a calendar and a forum  and many other nice tools for runners and the participation was huge. So when Runner's World decided to shut it all down many people migrated to RA, because it's  the same code and it was possible to migrate your entire log (which is what I did). So the initial boost from bringing in all that crowd was great, but yes it feels like RA has not been growing after that, not bringing in enough new people. It does come up in the top 5 when I search for "running log" on Google, so it cannot be entirely unknown, but maybe people expect it to have like a phone app or something.

Paul, I would not call a 50k week with a longer run and intervals "slacking", but your standards are high, so it might be a relatively easier week for you. And, yes, the short days are definitely not helping, but they are going to be getting longer now