2015 is My Time to be Great

It's that time when people summarize their training data for the prior calendar year. I've been tracking my training for years, and in fact, I scrounged up back to 2000, and I can see it in all its glory:

I highlighted the cumulative total through 2013, because that's when I went over 10,000 total hours of triathlon training. I assume that most readers have heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice at something to become good at it. At least at sports. Read this for variations by pursuit.

Now, based on my attainment of the magic 10,000 in 2013, one would think that 2014 would have been a banner year for me. But it wasn't. It turned out to be a "rest year." What I can now see by looking at this view of my training, and knowing my race performances, is that on the macro scale I need to take entire REST YEARS in addition to scheduling rest days and weeks. Cool, huh? This is what you can figure out when you keep the data on yourself! This is why I tell people it's important to track your training if you are in this game for serious performance goals, OR to get a high-level view of why your performance might be declining or you keep getting injured. From my own data, I can deduce that I should take a rest year every 3 years. This is great, because 2014 was rest, then I will build into 2015 and do an Ironman, build more and do Ultraman Hawaii in 2016, and then 2017 will be a rest year.

So 2014 was a rest year, which means that 2015 should be awesome! I have my "final" lineup of races/events through IMLOU:

Holy shit! Looks like a fucking shitload of fun! To say I'm excited to get on this (and I have been since 12/1/2014), would be the understatement of the century! My 2015 ATP has me at 680 hours through IMLOU. I will take some rest after that, and then begin training for Ultraman Hawaii, so I expect I will close out 2015 at around 825 hours. That's a big jump from 2014, but I've done that much before, so it should be no problem. Plus, it's highly likely that I won't bike as much as I've scheduled this year. I will still get in probably 13 century+ rides, which should do the trick. Still, this is an aggressive schedule, but I've got my 10k training hours in so all should be good!

It is hard to describe how great the above analysis (which I just did on the fly while writing this post) makes me feel. Turns out that all along there has been a method to my madness, and while some people think I'm totally fucking nuts, it all makes perfect sense to me.

Here we come, 2015, and as usual, the Crackhead Motto shall reign supreme:

"Harder, longer, faster, tougher, repeat."
--Crackhead

Tracking Comes Through Again

So up until just now, I thought 2012 was a complete wash for me training.  I got lazy about logging my workout time in my spreadsheet that keeps running tallies of everything on a calendar year and season year basis.  About a month ago, I went back and filled in about 8 weeks of zeroes (actually NULLS), and thought I was done, but there were still 4 weeks of nothing that I checked back in my handwritten log (yes I keep it on paper because God forbid my computer crashes and I lose the electronic record!) where I actually did SOMETHING.

So I entered data for the missing weeks, let the wonder that is Excel add it up, and guess what?  I still trained 672 hours in 2012.  I guess that's a little more than NOTHING, eh?

I've extrapolated where I will end up for 2013 using actuals through 7/14 and then accumulating planned training through the end of the year--it comes out to about 790 hours.  WTF???  I guess while I was in the dregs of depression and being generally fucked up mentally and physically, I also thought I wasn't training very much, but that was just my suppressed brain function talking.

Well NO WONDER my fitness and speed is coming back in a hurry!  I think there's hope for me yet!

To catch you up in case you've never seen my totals over the years, here they are:

This only goes back to 2007; I don't remember where I put 2000-2006 data (trust me, it's SOMEWHERE). 

2012 was still a relatively light year for me, since a lot of the workouts were done pretty easily, and the latter half of the year when I biked on the trainer, I had no speedometer or power meter, so I had no clue how hard (or easy) I was going.

So the point here is that it IS important to track what you are doing so you have an accurate record in case you find yourself on the road to turning into a Crackhead.