That Time I Ran 2000 Miles and Didn't Know It

Remember when I talked about that little goal I had of running at least 2000 miles in the year 2011? As it turns out, that part wasn't that hard at all. The hard part was doing the STUPID MATH so that I would actually be aware of it when I acheived the milestone. You see, I had been taking my yearly mileage number from Dailymile's "leaderboard" page- a section that shows how your miles measure up against all of your friends. I put my faith in that number. I lived by that number.

That number was WRONG.

Oh, Dailymile, your'e so cute sometimes with your little bumps and glitches. How did I come to this realization? Well, on Christmas Eve when I was logging my morning run, Jason looked over my shoulder on my laptop at this page on my training log. It looks like this:

(Yes, I'm aware that this particular display includes last December's mileage as well, but don't worry, I'm not counting that.)

Anyway he says to me "All those monthly numbers already add up to over 2000 don't they?"To which I PSHAWED and replied, "Of course not! I know my yearly total! Do you think I would have passed 2000 miles and NOT KNOWN IT?"

So I opened up my calculator and added up January, February, March, April, and so on.

And I got 2003.

So I added it again.

2003.

2003.

I passed 2000 that morning and I had no clue. In fact, I had finished 2000 exactly with my friend Sara merely an hour earlier and then bounded off for three more cooldown miles around the park, completely oblivious to my milestone.

Here is a screen cap of the leaderboard from the SAME DAY showing me at 1973 running miles:

Wrong, wrongwrongwrongwrong, Wrong, Wrongity-WRONG.

Maybe you think this is all a tad obsessive but for people like me it really is a big deal. My friends and I all use this site to track our workouts and believe me if any of us had gotten to January 1st and then found out Dailymile shorted us a few miles of our goal- it would not be pretty. At least in my case the discrepancy was in the other direction, but I still feel like the whole build up was a bit... anti-climactic now.

But still, yay? Now I get to spend the last week of the year running whatever miles I want, whenever I want, JUST BECAUSE I LIKE TO. And that's awesome.

One more thing: Did Jason really just "happen" to notice in passing that the two totals were off? Well, not really. You see, he was secretly working on a project for me and was actually more than just casually interested in how I was tracking my total. You see, he had been spending some time at the Milwaukee Makerspace building me an odometer that would download my miles from Dailymile. Yes. I said an ODOMETER. You know, like this:

I can plug this guy into my laptop and it will grab my miles from the interweb and display the running total accordingly. (His blog post about how he made it can be found here.) As it stands I'll probably wipe it out after the 31st and start over for 2012 and I'll keep it on display somewhere in the house. Really, the whole thing just tickles me. Robot Lady has an odometer now. It's too perfect.