Are you planning on earning VS miles only if/when you fly VS again?

If so, you may be missing one of the main points of VS: There are several partner (non-flying) situations where earning VS miles gets you lots of miles while earning AA miles gets you next to nothing. If you simply look out for these situations and choose to earn VS miles then (and AA miles in all cases where AA miles come out at least as good or even just close), then you'll likely still gradually increase that VS balance up to something really useful while not detracting much from your AA balance.

Check out the Flying Club partners pages on www.virginatlantic.com. You'll find, most obviously:

Car rentals at Avis or Hertz can earn you 500 to 1000 VS miles per rental, when they typically (outside of promos) earn you a paltry 50 AA miles per day or 1 mile per dollar with ANY rental company AA partners with, right?

Assuming your typical rental is 2 days, that's a 400 or 900 mile benefit to steering to VS, and it won't necessarily take that many rentals before your VS account is increasing by thousands. (And, btw, if you steer most of your rentals to VS from now on, until you get to a useful award level, you'll automatically continue keeping your VS account current.)

I know of people who've NEVER flown VS (paid) and who've mostly earned VS miles just through rentals and hotel stays where it worked out better to steer to VS, and who've gotten VS award tickets that way. And if you only do it in cases where the AA earning would be much much less (such as short car rentals), what's the loss to your AA account?

(If you only have a week to have your account's execution stayed, tho, I would recommend "wasting" 500 miles on that magazine subscription, as you can't be absolutely sure anything else will post in time. And looking above, restocking those 500 miles is likely to cost you only 100 AA miles or so...)