Friday, December 31, 2021

2021 Year In Review

Over the next couple of weeks I plan to post a series of "Year-in-Review" updates as well as pivot towards my plan for 2022.  First up is a summary of my total training volume in 2021 as compared to the prior 10 years: 


Several points are probably worth highlighting:

1. 2021 was a year where I made a concerted effort to ramp up my swim volume.  I popped over 300,000 yards right before Christmas on a swim with Anders at his health club in Cali.  I'm taking this week off from swimming as my local pool is undergoing its annual maintenance, but I plan to hit the swim hard again in 2022--right from the get-go.  In early 2021, I wasn't able to swim much due to CoVid and so comparatively I would expect to have a much stronger first quarter in 2022.  My expectation would be to set a new annual swim volume record this year (359,000 is my current record) and perhaps get close to 400,000 yards.  I'd like to average over 40,000 yards/month for the first three months in 2022.

2. My run volume was off dramatically in 2021, which was a conscious choice.  My knee really needs to be replaced (hopefully after Kona in late 2022) and so I had decided to mostly focus on swim/bike with a plan to ramp up my run volume during the summer.  I had begun to do that when Kona was cancelled again in August and I stopped running and pivoted to mostly hiking/walking/climbing.   My plan is once again focus on swim/bike during the 1st quarter in 2022 as I think that's my best bet as far as getting ready for Kona, with my knee.

3.  I had another big bike year and probably would have surpassed 2020 if Kona had stayed on.  As it was, I did 12,791 miles on the bike, which is an average of 35 miles every day in 2022.  I'm going to hammer the bike again ("bike monster") in Q1 with the majority of that in Delaware on my Zwift Kickr bike.  Given CoVid, I'm currently not planning any Q1 warm-weather camps at this time.

4.  I'd also point out that 2015 was low due to my back problems that year and the need for me to take the year off from training...

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