23 of 31 - less than a marathon left!

Run 23 of 31 today and it is starting to feel like the end is in sight. 8 more days, 40km remaining which is just under a marathon distance. Really starting to feel quite tired in the legs now, when I started this thing plodding through a run commute with a backpack on at the end of a working day felt like I was running through treacle yet I was still around 9m40s per mile. Today in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in which I should be well rested staying in touch with a 10min mile was hard work. Really looking forward to seeing what I run like a week or two into November when I've had a few rest days though.

Today's run was a 7km loop which is my "just get a run done and don't think about it" route so I had a couple of familiar Strava segments, even managed to PR one of them. The thing about Strava segment times though is you need to take them with a pinch of salt. I've been cynical of them since it apparently clocked me doing 35mph on a Brompton folding bicycle when in fact I was scooting it along the pavement so I don't really pay much attention to them but I decided to have a closer look at the one I PR'd today. So the all time leaderboard I'm somewhere in the middle as you'd expect but the top ten is interesting. Actually the top 1 is interesting as we have a guy who has a PR some 2 minutes faster over the 0.8 mile segment than the guy in position 2. Looking closer at the session in which the segment time was recorded this chap apparently beat the world mile record 2 or 3 times during his 8 mile run. Fortunately I'm never going to be close enough to any segment all time records to really care too much but I know a lot of people are motivated by grabbing them but it seems to me that once you get closer to the top on popular segments the whole feature loses it's value as you find yourself competing with people who at best have accidentally recorded the wrong sport (e.g. recorded a bike ride as a run), or at worst are downright cheating. That said down here in the slow section I find that a 10 second improvement will get me 10 places up the leaderboard which is a nice little push for next time!

Edit: Found out how to report dodgy data and our world record holder is no longer on the leaderboard.