My Strava 2025 Running Summary: Achievements and Goals

This week I got my annual Strava summary for 2025. Of course I already knew that compared to the past 2025 was a good year in terms of activity as it was the first time I reached the 500k running target. But seeing the statistics compared to the previous years it puts it in another perspective. To begin, since I joined Strava somewhere in 2017 I actually managed to run 500k in a year twice before. These were the covid years 2020 and 2021 where we were all forced to stay at home a lot. There was more time and not much else to do. Prior to March 2020 I had done a start to run program and I ran a bit every now and then but not consistently over the year. Then, with covid I started running in March 2020 and reached 500k before the year ended. But even compared to that year my weekly distance was higher in 2025 most of the time. Similarly I rand more than 500k in 2021 but there was a lot of variation in the weekly effort with a big dip in the June-August months. The only aspect that was better in 2021 compared to 2025 was that I was running in the January-March period, something I have been struggling with every year, also in 2025. So far 2021 has been the only year in which I kept running in the winter. So for 2026 this is another target : keep on running from January through March and keep that weekly streak going. But apart from the covid years 2025 was not just better, it blows away all previous years by more than 100%. I guess that says a lot about the previous years. But I don’t have competitive ambitions here,and certainly no speed targets. For 2026 I simply want to extend my long runs from 10k to 15k, keep running also through January-March and reach an average 20k per week running distance, up from 17k previously.In the last quarter I have started this migration by extending my short runs from 5k to 7k and only run 5k when I am pressed for time, turning the 5k runs into ‘speed’ runs, mixing it up which is supposed to be good to improve fitness.