Monday, January 2, 2012

A look back at 2011

First off, happy new year!  I got a little carried away with all of the festivities around the Christmas/New Years holiday season and unintentionally put my blogging on hold.  I'm sure you've been checking my site frantically, wondering if I was still alive.  In any case, just like everyone else in the world, I'm going to take a look back at my 2011 year and see what I accomplished (or in other words, see how much time I spent doing this triathlon stuff instead of other, possibly more important things.  Oops!)

Total Stats
Let's first look at my favorite sport...swimming.  Alright, so I pretty much hate swimming.  But it's just one of those love/hate relationships really.  I love triathlons, but I have swimming.  So it seems I have to find a way to enjoy it.  I jumped into the pool, or the lake, a total of 43 times last year.  That's not even one swim each week.  And for a typical triathlon training plan, there's at least two swims per week, which means I obviously didn't do very well at following the swimming portion of my plan.  I did swim a total of 47.57 miles, so I guess that's ok.  But it's nowhere near what it should be.  All together, I spent just over 27 hours in the water.  Yikes!

Next, let's take a look biking.  Riding my bike has always been fun, but now that I have my new speed demon, I really, really enjoy riding my bike.  I was pleasantly surprised when I saw my bike totals for last year.  I rode my bike(s) a total of 163 times last year (not including my beach cruiser!).  That adds up to over 223 hours...over 9 days of bike riding time!  I added up all of the elevation gain that I took on during my 9 days of riding, and it added up to 64,374 ft of climbing.  Now add that climbing to the rest of the riding that I did, and I totaled 3,970.39 miles in 2011.  That's a lot of time on an uncomfortable bike saddle!

And now for the running.  Running has been a bit interesting ever since I had a pair of stress fractures a few years ago.  I've been much more open to running on a treadmill, even though most people look down on treadmill running.  Regardless, I've definitely improved my running, and done a lot of it on a treadmill. I ran  on 134 separate occasions, with 72 of those being on a treadmill.  I ran for a total time of 136 hours, and 1 second.  And in all of that time, I ran 875.31 miles.

All together, I traveled over 4,900 miles, did over 462 hours of swimming/biking/running, and burned 175,022 calories!  What's crazy is that I know I ate even more calories than that!

Major Race accomplishments
I started 2011 off with a bang.  In January, I was slated to attempt the Walt Disney World Goofy's Race and a Half challenge, which is a half marathon on Saturday and a marathon on Sunday.  Well, being the glutton that I am, I added a 5k on the Friday before all of this (which is unofficially referred to as the "Dopey" challenge).  Not only did I finish this challenge, but I set a new PR for my marathon time and qualified for the Boston Marathon!

My next major accomplishment was setting yet another PR.  This time, it was in the half marathon distance at the Disneyland half marathon.  I ended up running a 1:29:37, which was good enough for 6th place in my age group!

Up next was my top priority race for the year...Ironman Arizona.  I seemed to be having some luck improving my PRs, so I was keeping my fingers crossed that I could keep this streak going.  And I did. I shaved off about an hour and a half from my last Ironman Arizona time, finishing in 11:39:49.

The final, and possibly the biggest race accomplishment I had during the 2011 year was running the Las Vegas half marathon with my wife.  The longest race she had completed before Vegas was the 5k back in Disney World in January.  Sharing that experience with her was definitely the icing on the cake for my athletic year.

So what's next?  Well, last year I did a lot more running races than I did triathlons, which seemed to be good for me because I'm actually a better runner than any of the other sports.  This year, I actually only have 3 races on my schedule so far...2 half iron distance races and one Ironman.  If all goes will on the ActiveAmbassdor.com front, then I might be adding a few more races to that list.  My goal race for the year is Ironman Coeur d'Alene in June, and I'll just have to see what happens after that.

I hope that you all were happy with what you accomplished during last year, and keep that momentum going into 2012!  Thanks for reading!

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