2009 Mileage detail

I figured I should expound on my year in review. The chart below shows how many months I was above my historical average.


You can easily see that my December blues this year are not abnormal but instead quite normal. Why, well my rationalization is that I have no races, the cold, darkness, Christmas, travel, snow, basically just adapting to winter. I am 100% sure if there was no snow, the numbers would be different. For 2009, the month with the lower mileage that was of interest was May. Why so low, injury is the answer. I injured myself (left foot/ankle and right achilles) at Chippewa and struggled through May, tried to ignore it in June as I did the Swan Lake Marathon and tried to ramp up further for Afton. That didn't work out so well as I dropped at Afton, took a week off and then I continued to train on the injuries but was careful to not aggravate them. Ultimately, I was able to increase the mileage and ramp for Surf the Murph. For my training, I only focused on getting and then staying healthy, anytime I had pain, I backed off. Basically, I had to log a lot of long slow miles and avoid any recurrence of injuries by not racing and avoiding any speed workouts and I avoided the roads to reduce any pounding and I backed off on the hills to avoid any additional stress. It worked out as the foot and the achilles healed up and I was able to get through Murphy.

I had said that I would explain my not making the 1500 mile goal. I was just 2 miles short and I could have easily gotten in 2 miles. I consciously choose not to as I just wasn't motivated enough to do it. So it is my new goal for 2010.

You see, I just needed a mental break from everything and gave myself a break over the holidays. We always travel over Christmas and our travel goes something like this; Saturday - drive to Chicago, visit with Karyn's family, Monday drive to Indy, visit with my family, drive back to Chicago, visit a bit more with Karyn's family, drive home. We usually drive 1500 miles over 5 days, it can be a bit tiring. Karyn and I did get a run in when we were in Indy, Carmel, specifically, we ran down the Monon Greenway trail. It's a converted rails to trails that is quite nice which runs down into Indianapolis and then north towards Westfield. Carmel has done a great job of intertwining the trail into it's city having built the Monon Center (community fitness center and water park) right across the trail and they are in the process of building a new music conservatory right next to the trail as well. My only complaint is that it is an asphalt trail. I did think about running on New Year's eve when we got home but the thought quickly left me and I am just fine with my new all time high of 1498 miles for a year.

So now it's time to re-group and start ramping towards something. The question is what?