3,200 miles, and counting.

Running Running Running, he's always running running running

Allen Au

Jul 24, 2025

Psst.

I just crossed a running milestone.

To date, I’ve ran 3,200 miles, or ~5,000 kilometers.

I’m not a fast runner, and I won’t break any PR’s, but I will break total mileage. One day soon I’ll do an ultra.

Since 2021, I tracked all my running mileage and experience self smartwatch and fitness tracker transitions. Since I have the data now, this is how that looks like over the years:

Data cleaned using ChatGPT, Apple Health, Garmin, and Strava data. Data visualized using Google Spreadsheet

My mileage has gone down beginning the middle of 2023. I started doing Lifetime and started taking fitness classes as a way to enhance my physical routines. Those are not factored in here, and you can clearly tell the reduction in mileage starts to happen in Q4 of 2023.

One of the few usable visualizations I had the patience to prompt ChatGPT on.

Before the end of Q1 2024, I started training for the 2024 May Orange County Half Marathon with Jason, and it would be my longest distance ran since 2017 when I did the Star Wars Disneyland Half Marathon. Then, others I knew started running the distance and I would then proceed to do the 2024 Long Beach Half Marathon.

I did more run clubs in the first half of 2025 including Social Hour Run Club in Cypress, California, and Jumeirah John Running Club in Dubai (I did these guys twice when I was out there), and had a continuous streak of long runs in Q2 of 2025 with a full-Irvine marathon ran in May 2025.

From short frequent runs, to long not-as-frequent runs. Though somehow I’ve made myself more injury prone.

That’s been fun.

I refuse to retake this screenshot because of my mouse cursor.

It took me 635 hours to get to that threshold, or about 4 years. It’s not a secret on how I adopted running, but it did take a considerable amount of years before it became routine.

And now, I have a growing shoe collection and I’ll even run in different countries as part of my vacation routine.

Somebody stop me.

Or else I’ll run into you.

p.s. And if you are around, yes you can run with me. Just know that I’m a 10 min pacer, which for most people, is easy & slow.

Fun fact

Almost all of this project was done inside of ChatGPT, including figuring out how to retrieve data, download data, cleanse data, review and remove duplicate patterns, as well as all of the visualizations. I even had it tell me how to recreate this one specific chart it made in Google Spreadsheet because I enjoyed the layout.

I remember when things like this took me a week, and now it took me one evening instead, of which most of the time was spent deciding what visualization I like the most.

Best part?

I contained it all to “one chat” so if you want to see how the prompting back & forth is, and how I used AI, you can. Shoot me a dm to check it out. No, I’m not concerned you’ll be able to “download” previous data files - ChatGPT auto-purges it every 10 minutes so you can’t really download anything.