Exercising in spite of a tough year on the body

This year has been awful physically.

In February, I suffered the worst flu in I don't remember how long--with a fever over 102, I even canceled classes!

In March, I strained my ankle because my right foot supinates quite a bit and it became obvious after I started running outside more. I now wear orthotic inserts to counteract the supination but I did not run for about a month.

In June, I experienced a brief bout of plantar fasciitis when my left arch began to bother me, perhaps a reaction to adjusting for my right ankle, resting it for about 5 days.

I also found out in June I have cataracts and so had surgery in July and August. While the surgery did not stop me from exercising, I was told not to over-exert myself for a week, so it was more walking than running/jogging.

Then as I started to speed up my pace a bit under the beautiful autumnal weather, by December I had developed patellar tendonitis which forced me to stop running for two weeks. So as I slowly began running again after my birthday, I came to realize that the time off was going to prevent me from reaching my exercise goal for the year.

1200 miles. That's a goal of 100 mile a month.

In all honesty, I should disclose that my mileage is a made up number. I mean, my walking/jogging/running numbers are actual miles--or at least as real as I can calculate by using Google map--but a significant portion of my miles (40%?) are guesstimates based on metabolic equivalents (METS) associated with aerobic exercises. For example, a typical work out for me would be 10.5 minutes of medium impact aerobics to warm up, the 25.5 minutes of high impact, then 10 minutes of high intensity interval training (HIIT), then finishing with 12 minutes of core/abs work. This is 58 minutes of aerobics exercise that totals a METS of 6.2--each exercise has its own METS number depending on intensity and each number has an equivalent in miles. My high impact aerobics equals a METS of 7 which is the equivalent of jogging 4.7 mph, so the 25.5 minute exercise equals 2 miles of jogging--although I always think that high impact aerobics feels harder that jogging 4.7 mph.

Yes, this is not an exact science, but it seems to me to be a relatively fair estimate of actual miles run and I so include it into my calculations.

In any case, what I wanted to say was that I've been exercising intensely since I graded finals and found myself doing more than 23 miles since Christmas Eve and as a result, I just might hit my goal by New Years Eve!

1200 miles, here I come!