Unfortunately, I haven't made 1K the past 2 years, but made it the 3 years prior all on segments. As others have related to above, I flew out of a hub without a connection. ORD-NYC nearly weekly (~46 weeks out of the year) which only nets out to around 70,000 miles. United is saying all this flying (plus a couple personal segment runs to put me over) isn't good enough to qualify for 1K?!
There are only 52 weeks in a year, so even an every week direct flier tops out at 104 segments unless they want to get creative with routing and fly even more than what they already are...which is every week in the year! It doesn't make sense.