End of Year Stats and Off-Season

It's been a nice last week. No workouts of any kind and eating anything I want, I now feel like your average American! I will be doing a run today and I'll start to get active once again this week.

End of year stats:
Run Distance: 615mi
Run Time: 91:15:00
Calories: 52,000
Weight Lost: 5lbs
Body Fat Lost: 6%
Looking back on 2011 I realize that I don't like those "Adventure Runs". I'm used to the Adventure Races like the Eco-Challenge or The Beast of the East kind of runs. These, in my opinion, are fun ways to get people into running, but have very little use for me and the types of runs that I do.

2011 was a successful training season, but some lessons were learned:
1. I need to make a better effort to get in my "long runs". I had a number of these runs that I missed this past year and I think that was part of the reason why I collapsed at the 21 mile mark.

2. I need to focus more on speed at the appropriate time. The biggest mistake that I made this year was that I started on speed work when I wasn't scheduled to do it. This resulted in an injury that put me on the shelf for a week. Not a huge loss, but another contributing factor to my breakdown in the race. Second, I was skipping some of my stride work that needs to be worked on more next season.

3. While my diet was great, I need to focus more on keeping myself on track. I give myself one cheat day a week and I need to use this as a reward for hard work instead of saying, "I think today would be a good day to cheat".

4. Getting in a run is sometimes more important then getting in your scheduled run. When you just don't have it for your run, just get out there. Sometimes you'll get motivated to do your scheduled run, and other times it will be good just to get out there.

So my plan for 2012:
1. Begin to do Duathons again. I'll focus on these on the early season (April & May).
2. Do the same Marathon Plan, but sticking more to the plan then I did this year.
3. Run the Twin Cities Marathon again wit a goal of 3:20:00.