2010 Wrap Up

For a long time now I have understood the value of writing down goals. It was simply a way to keep myself accountable and motivated to achieve what I set out to do. For the first 5 years that I have been participating in endurance sports I have met or exceed the goals I set every year and then there was 2010.

2010 started out great and I had some very exciting race results, however when it came around to October I was disappointed with my performance in Hawaii and even more with the choices I made during the race. This brought me down for a while and it took a while for me to accept and understand what happened. Now that I have done that I can move on and become even stronger as I have learned more about myself.

About 2 weeks ago an EN teammate started a thread asking how everyone did with their resolutions or goals for 2010. This made me look back in the file where I keep all my goals and review them. What I realized is even with the disappointing race in Kona I still met every one of my goals.

So here are what my 2010 goals were and my results:

• Enjoy the year with my wife and baby - Theresa, Abigail and I had a great year and while my training and racing is time consuming we still had many great times together as a family

• Have fun and not be stressed out over calories, numbers, training and racing like last year - I raced a few pounds heavier and missed a few workouts but in the end my mood was MUCH better, I had more fun, and I still had some great results

• Enjoy a vacation in Hawaii (and execute well at a race while there) - The week before the race and the week after were great. We had an awesome family vacation and as usual loved being together and in Hawaii. The race is a slightly different story, but I do believe I could have handled the situation much worse and in hindsight I made the best out of it

• Fix my swim - Thanks to some private lessons with Fitz I had big improvements in my swim. My 70.3 swim went from 37' to 31'. My ironman swim is not as telling, but I went 1:12 at IMWI 2009 in a wetsuit and 1:08 in Kona without a wetsuit so I will consider that another big improvement. I definitely have more work to do but made good progress for a year

• Be ready for 2011 when I get focused again - Originally this meant to relax and enjoy 2010 so that I could get very serious again in 2011. My race in Kona may have just been the best thing that happened to me on this front. After that race I spend a lot of time reflecting on all of my training and racing, I learned a ton about myself. The most important thing I learned is for me the "fun" part of racing triathlons is being competitive with myself and improving (racing others is fun to but I focus on myself as my competition). For this reason I now have a burning desire to continue to improve in 2011 and have my best year yet.

2010 Result Highlights

• Survived my first true injury that forced me not to run or swim for 2 months
• 1^st overall at the Life Time Fitness Indoor Tri
• 2:49:39 Boston Marathon – I'm thrilled with this as I only had about 6 weeks of real run training before the race
• 1^st overall at the Chicago Spring Half Marathon (1:15:25)
• 4^th overall at High Cliff Half Distance Tri
• 1^st overall at the Twin Lakes Triathlon
• 18^th overall at Ironman 70.3 Racine (3^rd AG and 8^th Amateur)
• 10:08:11 Ironman World Championship – two stops for mechanical and a change in plans on the run, see my race report for details

All of that aside, the single most important athletic achievement for me of 2010 was what I learned about myself. I learned so much about what drives me throughout the injury, my race in Kona, and the long process of reviewing all of my past training and racing data and reports. It's almost like I needed to have a race that I was disappointed with to force me to really sit down and think through a lot. The outcome of all of this will be some changes in 2011. That post will be coming soon.

Catching up...

I've always been pretty bad at keeping in touch with friends and family.  Last weekend I saw a few old friends that I have not kept in touch with and they both know about my races and Kona because of my blog.  That reminded me that even though I don't always have anything particular great to say I really should keep up with this blog a little better.

I'm going to attempt to make more frequent (but shorter) updates going forward....

First off, thanks to everyone that contact me about my Kona race report and experience.  I really value your advice and thoughts.

Since Kona, I took some downtime from serious training and then I once again lead a pace group at the NYC Marathon.  It's amazing how enjoyable running a marathon can be when there is no pressure, no goals and all I have to do is have fun and talk to people.  I was able to train without a plan for a few weeks and just do what I wanted when I wanted.  I even showed up to a 5k untrained and just ran for fun to see what would happen. 

I loved all of it and for a bit I even started to think about stepping back and just doing endurance sports for the enjoyment of them.  However after only a few weeks of down time, I already had the itch to get back to real training and I knew I wasn't going to be able to take it easy.

I then spend a while review all of my past training data and race reports and realized that I am great at training and not so good at racing.  Other than a few random b-races, I have yet to perform to my potential or to how I perform in training during a race.  Although I have been pretty successful over the last few years I'm now looking into a few ways I can restructure my season and training to hopefully allow myself to perform better at races.

My next few post will be a recap of the 2010 season, my goals for 2011 and hopefully by then I will have figured out my plan for next year and can share that as well.

In the meantime I am back to following the Endurance Nation Off Season Plan.  In only 5 weeks I've got my FTP back to within 2 watts of where I finished the OS last year.  My running is taking a little longer to come back but I'm continuing to make good progress.

If you didn't already see from my facebook status, I was nominated for Chicago Magazine - Athlete of the Year after being selected as athlete of the month earlier this year.  Voting is still open but I believe it closes very soon.  If you do decide to vote for me, I recommend you pick Jean Marinangeli as well.

Vote here: http://j.mp/cpUNxF