September by the Numbers

Each month I reflect back and look at some of the data I collect around my health and wellness. This practice helps me make adjustments, spot trends and hopefully inspires some of you to do the same. September will be an interesting one to look back on. I Travelled to Utah and California, and don’t often get on airplanes and change time zones. My focus on sleep and steps for the past year let me get some good quality rest regardless, we’ll see what the numbers say though.

Steps: 335,380 total for a daily average of 11,179.

Not too much of a surprise here. I got over 50,000 steps in during the Wasatch Front, where I ran 45 miles. After that though, I shut it down for a couple of weeks to let my body recover. When I was in Long Beach, I got 20k steps in each day, which was impressive considering I traveled both of those days. It also gave me pause to think about how my college roommate and I were walking around crushing steps instead of beers like we would have been 15 years ago. My lowest step day was 4 days after Wasatch, 3,333 steps. All in all, despite it being over 100,000 steps less than in August, it’s nothing too surprising. October’s step numbers will climb and I prepare for my next race.

Sleep: Average Duration - 7 hours 54 minutes

What! I can’t believe it. So close to an 8 hour average I’ve been chasing for a year. Truly surprised, with all the travel it didn’t seem like this would be this high. In California, I got tons of sleep though, upwards of 9 hours each night. Utah, I skipped a night of shut eye all together while running, and I thought that would affect the average. I got more than 8 hours 13 nights out of the month. Once I was home more consistently on the later half of the month, the travel was catching up to me and I was sleeping in much later that I typically do, this also helped my average climb this month.

Workouts: 24

In a surprising turn of events, only 10 of these were running workouts. I spent a lot of time this past month in the gym and moving around. When I’m running a lot, the gym is an opportunity to tune up my body, and make sure everything is working like it should. When I finish a workout, I want to feel refreshed, and I want my body to feel prepared for the next effort. I did a lot of kettlebell workouts, pull ups, and power cleans. I even got a heavy deadlift session in.

Some other running stats for the month:

Total runs: 10

Miles: 80

Hours: 21

Gain: 14.717 ft

In other running news, I’ve cracked 500 miles on the year, not a lot by any means, but it’s my first time doing so since 2020, and I’m happy about it.

Thanks for reading, remember, if you’re wearing a fitness tracking watch, you have all of this information available as well. Be sure to pause a look at it to make some adjustments for the coming month.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain