Looking back and looking forward to 2014

Now that New Year's has come and gone, and events are starting to pop up on my calendar (remember my last post about planning?), I like to pause and look at my overall goals for the past, and set new ones for the coming year. This post is gonna very self-focused, but will be one of the few such posts that I make during the year (aside from race reports, which I try to make useful for all anyways)

Last year my overall goal was to double the distance that I both ran and biked (blog post here), bringing those numbers to a target of about 550 and 650 miles, respectively. Swimming technically should have been there, but I'm pretty bad at keeping count of laps by myself, and my watch doesn't measure pool swimming.

Since I actually do manage to log most of my run/bike workouts in TrainingPeaks, checking is easy and it
turns out I did pretty well. I was pretty much spot on with my running (493 miles), and passed my biking goals, covering over 1200 miles. Looking at distance isn't everything of course, especially when considering that I do races, but the times tend to be skewed because I often leave my watch on after training and races, and it gets added in. I use races and individual training sessions as better measures of my overall pace.

For 2014, I don't want to just double my distances again, since I feel that finding time to train might be getting harder this year as I will have to handle some personal challenges (for lack of a better word) like getting married. Instead, I'll be focusing on the quality of my workouts, making sure that every workout has a point. Also, I've been refocusing on my nutrition both in-race and general life, which I'll be sharing in future posts.

So what are my goals for 2014? Well I've got two Half-Ironman distance races scheduled (Vineman and Princeton 70.3), so from a purely time-based perspective I'd like to go sub-7. It's not such an ambitious goal, but considering the GI issues at my last race I want to be conservative. For running, I want to break the 4 hour mark on any and all marathons I do, and do at least 1:45 on all half-marathons. My time goals might not be crazy competitive to some, but I am after all just an average age-grouper, with other things going on. Though I am extremely passionate about endurance sports, I believe in having a well balanced life.

Just a short post today, so happy training and stay safe out there!