Life Update After 6 and a Half Marathons

I turn 50 in September, so, naturally, I did what any software engineer does at a milestone birthday: I dumped a decade of Strava data on an AI and asked it to tell me about myself. No goals, no specific question, just “here’s _activities, what do you see.” What came back felt worth sharing, so here it is.

The numbers, zoomed out

10 years, 1,008 runs, 6,329 miles, 965 hours, 204,183 ft of climbing. Somewhere in there, 7 marathon starts: 6 in New York and 1 in Paris. Six of those seven I finished; the seventh, my sixth NYC start, is the one I didn’t — which is where the “6 and a half” in the title comes from.

Pace has drifted from 8:17/mi in 2018 to 9:47/mi this year, while weekly volume roughly doubled. Meanwhile average heart rate across runs actually dropped, from the low-160s (2018-2021) to the high-130s/low-140s now. Slower, at a lower heart rate, on more miles — the AI’s read was that this is a mix of an aging max heart rate and a genuine shift toward easier, more aerobic running. Fair enough.

The marathon that didn’t happen

Last November’s NYC Marathon has a Strava title of “Insult and Injury,” which should have been a clue even before the AI pointed it out. Splits were solid through mile 14, then fell apart on the Queensboro Bridge descent into 1st Ave, and I stopped at mile 19. Doctors couldn’t pin it down definitively, but the symptoms and the mile-by-mile blowup pattern point straight at IT band syndrome — a classic late-race, fatigue-and-downhill story. I’m running it again on November 1st, ten weeks from now, this time with hip/glute strength work and a cadence bump built into the plan instead of bolted on after the fact. (That’s me above, at the Brooklyn Half in May, part of this year’s comeback build-up, still at a respectable 8:36/mi average.)

The gym, the mileage, and the plot twist

Since last November I’ve also been at the gym about 5 days a week — a habit that, cross-referenced against the run log, turns out to have quietly cut my running volume roughly in half (21 mi/wk down to under 10) while my running consistency got measurably worse (gaps between runs went from ~2 days to ~3+, with several week-plus gaps that didn’t used to happen). The AI’s blunt assessment: the gym didn’t add to the running, it competed with it.

And, since we’re doing full transparency here

I’ve also been dating someone much younger, since right after the marathon, and I now have a regular workout partner, which I assumed was fueling all of this newfound gym enthusiasm. The data agrees — just not in the direction I expected. Motivation is clearly up. It’s just showing up as gym attendance, not running consistency. Turns out an accountability partner doesn’t automatically go for a run with you.

The people I actually run with

A lot of my titles start with “Run with,” and the log turns out to be a decent proxy for my life outside running. My kids show up the most: 93 runs with Ilan going back to 2018, and 69 with Milla since 2022 — apparently the two most reliable running partners I’ve ever had. My current girlfriend, G, shows up 29 times starting in December 2025, right on schedule with everything else that changed after the marathon. Scattered in between are one-off runs with friends — a reminder that running has quietly been the thing I default to sharing with whoever’s around, family, friends, or otherwise.

So, at 50

The honest summary an AI gave me, unprompted: you’re fitter in some ways, less consistent in others, recovering from an injury you’re not fully rehabbing, and about to run a marathon in ten weeks on a training block that fell apart last week. None of it was wrong. Time to go fix the parts that need fixing before November 1st.

By the numbers, because A.I. tokens are cheap

929,656 calories burned across 1,008 runs.
6,549 kudos and 6,205 achievements/PRs logged since 2017.
Most-run shoe: an Adidas CS 2022 with 738 miles on it, followed by a Supernova ST at 592. Every pair I own is Adidas — I’m Russian, it’s basically a requirement.
Temperature range: 8°C (Crested Butte, Feb 2025) to 35°C (New Orleans, June 2023).
All-time PRs, unofficial and GPS-measured: mile in 6:00 (2022 5th Ave Mile), 5K in 21:13, half marathon in 93:54 (2018 Brooklyn Half), full marathon in 3:38:14 (2018 NYC) — every single one of them set in 2018 or earlier.
Highest heart rate ever recorded: 209 bpm, in 2018, on a run named “Running with Software Engineers.”
Biggest single-run climb: 682m, at the 2019 North Face ECS Half.
Longest daily running streak: 10 days, ending September 2023.
Longest break between runs: 39 days, January to February 2021.
Biggest single month: 183.7 miles, September 2025 — the month before “Insult and Injury.”
Most common time to start a run: 8am, by a wide margin.
Devices logged: mostly a Garmin Forerunner 945 (742 runs), with a Fitbit Ionic (168) and a few years of phone-only tracking before that.