Numbers Do Not Lie...

After my last post, I got some really good advice from some of the comments, and that advice was to look at my logs and there I would find my answers as to why I was stalling in my pursuit to podium progress. For those of you that do not know, I utilize a site called beginnertriathlete.com to log all of my workouts. It lets me keep running monthly and yearly totals of my activity, it is a great site with a lot of good information also! So it was easy to go there and get my yearly totals for this analysis.

Anyways, a fellow blogger, Jeff, from Danglethecarrot.com, really helped me analyze my year and he helped me realize that I need to do a lot more work if I wanted to see the results I wanted. At first, I was taken back, I mean, I did s/b/r all those miles logged, and I had increased my running by a couple hundred miles over 2010, but the numbers do not lie. Here is what the analysis told me.

2011 Totals

Swim    27h 24m 34s  -  83351.67 yards

Bike     56h 44m 35s  -  959.31 miles

Run      94h 33m 11s  - 543.09 miles

Not to shabby I always thought. But let's go one more step and break it down by the month!

Swim  6,945 yards per month

Bike  79.94 miles per month

Run 45.26 miles per month

14.83 hours training per month

OK, I like how the swim numbers are looking, the bike could use a little work!  But, let's go deeper, let's break it down by the week!

Swim 1,602 yards per week

Bike 18.44 miles per week

Run 10.44 miles per week

3.42 hours training per week

Ouch, no wonder my gains were so little. It's weird, because it felt like I was always doing something! Now, I am not going to break it down by day, cause let's face it, those numbers would suck, but basically it was like under 30 minutes a day. I would have never believed this if I had not seen it broken down. Now understand, after September, I focused solely on running for the marathon, so that increased my running numbers and I did not bike or swim at all during Oct, Nov and most of Dec, but it is still an eye opener. So what do I do about this? Do I set some goals?

You bet I do!

But, I am not setting any specific race goals, but more like training volume goals, in other words, I am building a strong base for 2012, which will help me hit those better times that I want and expect to hit in races. So here are my yearly goals for 2012.

Swim 145,500 yds

Bike  2,215 miles

Run 870 miles

I could break this down monthly and weekly for you, but it breaks down roughly to 2,800 yds swimming, 42.59 miles biking and 16.73 miles running a week. That is doable because I want to do it. So lookout 2012, here I come! in 2012, you should definitely Fear the Hat!  (more on that in a later post).

Thanks again to Jeff and Mike for helping me out!!! The new training page is up with January's workouts listed, take a look!