Hello internet, it’s been a while. As the New Year approaches I’ve been reviewing my year in running and planning the year ahead. I figured I’d try to articulate what I accomplished this year and what I hope to accomplish next year in a series of posts. This is probably all dullsville to you, but it is helpful for me. In this post I’ll review what I did in 2010, in the next post I’ll  address my plans for 2011.

At the beginning of 2010 I was a runner who had tried and failed, repeatedly, to get good at running. I’d run, gotten hurt, rested, run again, and got hurt again. At the start of 2010, I decided that I was going to take this running stuff seriously and that meant being smart and upping the miles slowly. I did that and I had what was by far the most productive year of physical exercise I have had since I was in high school.

The first half of the year was detailed in minute detail here, but as the summer began, my time for justthedistance kind of petered out. I did keep running though, putting in a number of fifty mile weeks in the heat of a Washington, DC summer. In September, I moved back to Brooklyn and in November, I started a new job. The move back to New York really hurt my running, I have a lot more friends in New York than I did in DC, and E is here. It was often more tempting to cuddle on the couch than get in the miles.

Still it was a good year running wise. Briefly, here is what went right and what went wrong:

Right:

• I have run almost every day in 2010. I made a concerted effort to both hard the fuck up about minor aches and pain, and address more serious injuries as soon as they occurred. This and building up the mileage slowly really helped.
• As of this writing, my mileage for the year is 1,614 Miles in a total of 246:45:31 hours for an average of 9:11 / Mile. I’ll probably add another fifty or so to that before the year is over. That doubles the amount of miles I ran in 2009. I’m proud of that.
• I began to learn to race. I am starting to understand the timing of a 5k and I am definitely getting a better handle on what it means to really gut it out at the end of a race. I fucking collapsed crying in Philadelphia people. That is progress.
• Currently, I weigh 175 pounds; at the start of 2010 I weighted in at 193 (or thereabouts). I’d like to drop ten more pounds but I am definitely on my way.

Wrong:

• Though my consistency improved, it wasn’t enough. I really let the move to New York fuck with me, and I paid for it come Philly.
• I did almost no speed or core work that needs to change this year if I want to get faster and stay injury free.
• I focused too much on marathon training. The marathon is the big goal for many hobby joggers, myself included, but I focused on them to the detriment of my training. I’ll get into this more in another post, but 2011 is the year of the 5 and 10 k for me with one marathon in the fall.

At the beginning of the year my marathon PR was 5:45:00 (or thereabouts). In the spring, I lowered that to 4:27, and then this fall in Philadelphia I lowered it again to a heartbreaking 4:00:58. I won’t lie, I was really hoping to break four hours in Philly, but I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t quite make it. My training in September and October had really suffered, and I paid for it on race day. Next year, though, next year…

I made some significant progress this year, but not quite as much as I had hoped to make. 2011 however is going to be a different story, 2011 is going to be my year. More on that later.