1 year of training in the books...

Most of you that have been following my blog know that I just started doing triathlons last year. July marks one year of training in the books. It's seems so long ago, but July is when I got my first bike and started cycling. It's crazy how much I've learned about the sport in such a short time and how much work I have to get where I want to be. I really didn't know what I was doing at first. I bought a mountain bike because Xterra appealed to me and I rode a lot on the streets at first with these type of strap on pedals. My idea of off-roading was riding the horse trails that surrounded my neighborhoods! Eventually I put on some real pedals and started riding real trails around Temecula and San Diego.

Then the swimming. I should try and dig up a video of Amy did of me when I first started swimming. It was really scary. Like, maybe I should put this video camera down and make sure he's not drowning kind of scary. Amy swam in high school and I'm thankful she didn't just laugh out loud and tell me to quit while I'm ahead. But I stuck with it and have finally found some form - although I need a coach bad. Any takers??

And then the running. Injury and frustration have been the story here. The problem is, I still train like I used to. Pretty wreckless...kinda like Fam talks about I guess. Back then I never got injured. I rarely stretched, iced, massage or anything. Unfortunately, those habits still exist with me and if I want to get to the next level, I know I need to focus more on recovery. But other than little set backs here and there, my running has progressed leaps and bounds over last year.

The purpose of this post is to really reveal everything about my training that most triathletes won't do. That is numbers. I was pretty shocked to see how low everything is. I know these numbers are skewed a bit because when I first started training it was very low for about 2-3 months. I was just trying to figure out how to balance everything out (still am).  Regardless, I post this as more of motivation too. I feel like I've become pretty fast/respectable despite the low training hours/miles. This only means one thing to me. Get the work done!

So here is my data that I snagged from my Garmin after year 1 in the books:

Swimming
Distance: 130,737 yards or 2,500 yards a week  (about 1.5 miles/wk)
Hours: 70

Cycling (Road and Mountain Bike):
Distance: 2,444 miles or 47 miles a week
Hours: 164

Running:
Distance: 765 miles or 15 miles a week
Hours: 104

Strength Training
30 hours

Average Weekly Training Volume: 7.07 hours

Now I would say that my training volume is more around the 8-11hr range now and that my cycling mileage is definitely over 100/wk now, but running is MAYBE 20-25/wk and swimming is more around 6,000/wk. One thing I do see from it all is that there is a lot of potential. I'm making a slow transition to 15 hours/week and hopefully I'll find a way to 18 which is my magic number right now. Everything has just been high intensity and not many junk miles - which is what I need. I know it'll allow me to recover better and stay away from injury.

I'm hoping that by this time next year my average weekly training training volume will be doubled. To hold myself accountable to this (after all, this blog is a training diary too) I'm going to start posting weekly totals for each discipline, kind of like Andrew Hodges does in his blog. I think this will be a great way to hold myself accountable on each sport; because although TrainingPeaks shows weekly totals, it doesn't break it down on the free version I'm using.