Saturday, January 30, 2010

Good-Bye Atlanta Trails Blog! Hello Golden Trails Blog!

I have decided to move this blog to the Golden Trails Blog. Hope to see you over there!

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

2009 in Review

Looking back at my 2009 season, I have found that it fell in four phases:

Cruising at S2S 50k

Phase I: Successful Spring Races (February-April)
February through April proved to be the busiest from a racing perspective. I raced five times in three months and paced once. This was also a very successful period. Each race was either a PR or a top 10 finish or both. Prior to this period I had never finished top 10 in any trail race. I also pushed my 50k PR down by 35 minutes.

Phase II: Getting Faster (May - August)
The heavy spring mileage and extensive travel and work forced me to focus on shorter runs. And to great effect. The Angel Island 16k was probably my best race of year (3rd in a sold out race).

Phase III: Life and Such (September - October)
I really struggled those two months in terms of keeping up my running and staying motivated. The wedding, start of school and Cal's football season made things really busy. More importantly though, I was struggling mentally to get in my runs, especially long runs. But I fixed that by late fall to...

Phase IV: Finish with a Bang! (November - December)
Both December races went really well. I am especially proud of my time at the Muir Beach 50k (4:55). Not only did I finally break five hours, but it also represented a 52 minute (!) improvement over my 2008 50k PR time. What a great way to finish up the year!

Overall, I feel that I am much better runner, but I am itching for more! I've got some surprises in store for 2010!

Sunday, January 3, 2010

1883.14

That's my mileage total for 2009, which I'm happy with. It beat my minimum goal (1,500) but fell a bit short of my dream goal (2009). 1883 gets you from Berkeley somewhere outside of Iowa City if run consecutively. Not bad at all. It's also my most ever annual mileage. Sweet!

This is my third straight year of tracking my mileage all 12 months (I used to track only my training to an annual road marathon or two in years prior).

Here are the previous totals:
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a city this time that I had actually been to for visualization purposes. I have been to Dubuque, IA, but that's 2003 miles from Berkeley...