Sunday, January 20, 2013

training starts

Well as I sit here watching some great football, I look back at the past week happy that I was focused on keeping my fitness up.
There is a reason why we keep running in the off-season even though we are not training for anything specific.
As it turns out, I have caught something.  I have an upper chest/respiratory infection/cold.  I feel ok but I have some congestion in my upper chest and it has taken a bit of a toll on me.
I went on a run on Thursday and could tell I was very weak.  So I decided, with some encouragement from some friends that I should take it easy, relax and stay focused on what needs to be done long term.
So that is what I am doing.  I am not happy about it but I feel that I have kept my endurance going that I can take a couple of days off and not do too much damage.
So I hope that I will be able to get back at it soon.

Will up date on my progress.

Monday, January 14, 2013

A look back at 2012

So even though I have been extremely busy I am going to make a commitment to updating once a week.

2012 was a very good year.  I am on daily mile and recently received an email with my training summary.  Not too bad if I do say so myself.

I covered 2,433 miles in running and biking.  This was an average of 46 miles per week.  I logged 340 miles and burned 70 miles.
So I decided to review my Gamin stats.  It took me a minute to remember how to navigate, but I figured it out.
I had 165 Activities for running with a total distance of 726.27 miles in 123:29 hours/mins.  My average speed was 5.9 mph and burned 117,786 calories.
For Cycling I had 182 activities and went 1,729.31 miles in 117:52 hours/mins.  My average speed was 14.7 mph and I burned 128,236 calories.
I did spend 4 hours doing 12 "other" activities and burned 1,021 calories.  There was also 5 activities that I did for a total of 2:39 hours/mins.  I only burned 194 calories.  Not sure what they were but it counts.

In looking back I accomplished a great deal.  I have kept myself fairly healthy and have really improved my speed on my feet. 

I obtained 3 new personal bests.  My 5k, 10k and half marathon, in that order.
My 5k is 24:25 at Sadies race on May 12th, my 10k is 53:42 at Columbia Turkey Chase on Nov 18th and my Half is 1:56:35 at Annapolis Half Marathon on Dec 1st.

I have not done a full marathon since the Marine Corp in 2010.  I do plan on doing another one, maybe this is the year.  Maybe not.  We shall see.  I am wanting to get into duathlons more this year, but I have a lot of events on my bucket list.  Speaking of the bucket list, I did a Spartan race this past year.  Don't plan on doing anything like that again.  One and definitely done with that.  There are many different obstacle or themed events out there and I am just not interested in doing anything like that again.

Getting back to duathlons, this year I plan on doing 2 events that I have done before, The Virginia Duathlon and the Maryland Olympic Duathon.  I am going to hope to do both duathlons in Hagerstown but we shall see.

One thing that I have come to realize is that I need to do more stretching and work on my core.  I plan to do that.  I am also going to give the 100 push ups a try.

I am going to be giving a couple of different things a try this first quarter, training apps, work out routines etc.  I will keep you posted.

well thanks for reading. I will update more later.