In all likelihood, I'm traveling back to Shanghai from a ski trip with my family and Henry right now. (This post was written in advance to make sure I would have Day 1 content for my goal of 366 days of log blogging.) Since I'm probably not going to be back on that training grind until Sunday (when spring triathlon season prep officially begins!), I decided that for these first two days, I would write a few reflections about 2015 on day 1 and a post looking forward to 2016 on day 2. Today, I will be looking at some numbers regarding my training volume and mileage from last year.
(All data based on info from Garmin Connect. Note that I didn't get my Garmin until late January so the January numbers are not accurate representations of what was happening in January.)
Let's start with the overall breakdown of activities, which is really just how many workouts of what type I did in any given month:
Predictably, I swam and lifted the most in the spring months prepping for my last ever Club Swim Nationals, I ran the most during the summer when I was in Boston and that was my main form of training, and I had the most balanced big training month in August, which was my last heavy block before two September races.
Honestly, this entire year has not been exactly what I wanted it to be. My running is really the only thing that I've gained a lot of confidence in (which sort of fell off towards the end of the year because of the lack of training and the lower body injury). My cycling was improving for a period of time, but then I sort of stopped going after it as aggressively after my September triathlon races and so now I'm back to being quite timid about it. My swimming has gotten markedly worse since I left Princeton. The pool workouts have been less focused and less frequent and the lack of quality strength training owing to my August back injury has really hindered my swimming. So all in all, there's only one discipline of my three that I feel like I made strides in this year.
In addition, the year has been pretty inconsistent. With senior year insanity early in the year, graduation and lots of moving and traveling and general instability throughout the summer, and the medical school adjustment happening in the late part of the year, I feel like I really didn't string together any good full segments of training with the exception of the month of August. I do believe made the best out of a non-ideal set of situations, but I would like to see more stability to help build more consistency.
I've also been disappointed in the fall off in training hours in the latter months of the year. I know that it's probably not possible to sustain the kind of momentum I had in August/September/October throughout the entire year, so the challenge will be figuring out how to organize my year such that I won't have to take extended R&R intervals (although they are necessary and will need to be incorporated into my year) in order to maximize the number of good months I have.
I do, however, know that it's possible to manage the hours that I aim for and my medical school life obligations. August, September, and even parts of October really showed that to me. I haven't struck exactly the right balance yet and I definitely still need to be more in tune with my mood, but I think this year has shown that it's possible and I just have to keep refining the scheduling the same way I have to keep refining my actual swimming, biking, and running skills.
Here is a plot of total training hours, since number of workouts is not always the best indication of training volume:
It's pretty clear from this that the heaviest training month was August, as intended, and the rest of the year was pretty even with the exception of this past month or two (again, January data is inaccurate because I didn't get my watch until the last week or two of the month). For August, I hit about 2430 minutes of total training time, which is almost 9.5 hrs/wk, right around where I want the serious months to be. Under typical circumstances, I would have probably like June and July to also be around that volume, but with graduation and moving and living out of Henry's place and moving again and going home and all that other madness, it's understandable why this summer wasn't the time for it. It's worth noting that 1500 min/month amounts to about 5.8 hrs/wk, which is around where I was floating for other months and quite a bit less than what I want it to be. I would like to be up around 7-8 hrs/wk on those less big months. Looking into the calendar in more detail, in reality what was happening was I had some 8-11 hour weeks and some 2-4 hour weeks and the average of those things played out this way. August was unique in that I only had one week where my schedule was greatly thrown off, so I hit most of the weeks the way I wanted to. Again, it all comes down to consistency and this year was generally very wobbly when it came to consistency.
The other thing I wanted to look at was mileage. Let's start with run mileage:
My biggest months were July and October, when I had both my half marathons, so that's to be expected. Those months turned out an average of ~25 miles/week while the average month was closer to ~15 miles/week. Given how new I am to running, I'm pretty happy with what those numbers are, even though I know that this is pretty low mileage as far as running is concerned.
Now onto cycling mileage:
If I'm being honest, this makes it pretty clear that I was really only biking when I knew I really had to be, and even then I was not biking very much. This is definitely one part of my game that I really need to step up.
And swimming mileage:
My biggest swimming month averaged 8.67 miles (~15,000 yards), which actually isn't very much at all (5 x 3000 yard practices/week). The rest of the year, the swim training was fairly spotty.
So what was the point of this exercise? Well you have to know where you've been and where you're starting in order to get to where you want to go. These are the numbers from this year. Really only one of my months felt like a very high quality month for me and I would love to get more consistency out of the rest of my year so that all of my months can be higher quality months. Some years are better than others and I would say that this hasn't been the best year for me (although my running has been steadily improving and I am very happy about that). I'll be back tomorrow to talk about where I would like these numbers to go in the upcoming year.
Stay tuned and Happy New Year! (:
Much love,
Jess
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