Saturday, December 31, 2011

November/December/2011 Round-Up

Soooo ... you may have noticed I haven't done a monthly round-up for a while. Quite honestly, it's because I really haven't had anything to round-up.

Yes, I know that's bad. Yes, I know it sucks. Please, no comments from the peanut gallery.

I could list off excuses for why the fall/winter have been so bad ...
- work
- moving
- wedding
- exhaustion of the year's stress piling on
... but I really don't like making excuses. I didn't make the time to fit in workouts. Could I have? Most likely. Did I perceive having the energy to do so? Nope. I've read everything about "just do 10 minutes, you'll feel like doing more," or "you can find 10-15 minutes to fit something in," or "working out will give you more energy," but the last few months even 10 minutes has felt monumental to me. To us, really.

To wit, the numbers from the past few months:

Running: 19.27 mi
Swimming: .19 mi
Cycling (outside): 0 mi
Cycling (inside): 0 mi
Lifting: ... maybe once? can't find my dang log to verify.
Other: ... if lifting a whole hell of a lot of boxes and carrying them up essentially a walk-up apartment counts ... yes. A whole lot of that.

The other thing that REALLY didn't help is our usual online log dying on us. For the past few years, we've logged our workouts not only in a physical log, but on a Facebook app called Voomaxer. This year, it crashed a few times and finally died ... I think in mid-November. The creators of the app got sick of Facebook's constant tweaking of itself and said that our data still existed, it just existed on its extremely user-unfriendly Web site.

Dealing with that mess was so frustrating and, in a weird way, I think demotivating as well. However, in late November, we took the plunge and joined Beginner Triathlete. I personally haven't played around all that much with it yet (seeeee the crappy numbers), but I think ultimately it will be better for us. Brandon's considering even upgrading from the free membership to really utilize all the site has to offer (tips on this would be welcome).

However, as it is December 31, it is time (in about 12 and a half hours here) to bid this year adieu. The last week in general has been pretty crappy, but this year, on a whole, I'd have to say was a good one. We got married, did our first half-Ironman, got a new place, I got a job promotion ... a lot of good things. I just wish we didn't do them all in ONE YEAR because that much stress? Sucky.

Running this year went okay, even though our mileage went down from 2010.

Swimming was a struggle for much of the year with less mileage, but I almost completely transitioned to the crawl/freestyle stroke, so that is a good thing.

Cycling, despite my retarded feet in the HIM, was a huge success this year. We both put up our biggest cycling numbers ever and I really do think it paid off, with our fastest averages in races to date.

Lifting went really well over the summer, in the fact that we did it consistently. I also think that paid off on race day.

Other workouts weren't as plentiful or as varied, which is really kind of a bummer.

For 2012, our focus is SPEED. 2013 is Ironman and endurance and the grind, so we'd like to focus a lot on speed and short-course racing this year. We may consider a late season 70.3 (Harvest Moon, maybe?) and are definitely planning on one or two half-marathons, but fall training is going to be tricky as we're going to Europe in September for our delayed honeymoon/first anniversary trip. Where we really don't plan on working out much. Running, maybe. Walking, definitely. Eating well? Screw that. Food in France is AWESOME.

When Brandon gets home this afternoon, we're going to try and come up with a game plan for our racing season and I'd like to come up with some training goals as well. Maybe mileage goals; we'll see.

Hope everyone's 2011 was good, and hope that 2012 is much, much better!

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