2023 ended up having more races than recent years — I think I did 6 or 7 ultras — Uwharrie (40 miles) (10th time, I’m now retired!) (*), Mount Mitchell Challenge (40 miles), Mount Mitchell Heartbreaker (50 miles, 14k elevation), Grand Canyon adventure run (40 miles), Barkley Fall Classic (~35 miles, 12k of elevation, and Hellgate (66 miles, 13k elevation) .
I didn’t do any of the challenges I mentioned last year like a Everesting or vEveresting (bike) challenge, nor the marathon on the concept ii rower. I really need to make a list of these ideas and knock them out one at a time. Other adventures I need to get serious about are The Quad (4 state AT challenge), SCAR, etc. And I’ve actually never ridden a century on the bike! All things to think about in 2024 and beyond.
(*) I reserve the right to run Uwharrie again if some special reason arises!
Here come the normal graphs I track….
First up, elevation. So I’ve still not hit 365k in a year, and think that’s going to be tough until we live I the mountains some day! But it was still a good year at 308k (Strava graph further down shows 311k?). (I still think 2021 may have some elevation that shouldn’t be in there — Garmin DH mountain bike tracking counting the chairlift rides up, for example??)
Next up is total time… I always put in 550, not really sure why. 500 should be the goal, which I hit this year. :-)
Running – goal was 1000 and surprisingly I hit it!
Barely:
Riding – pretty low:
Strength training, was again a focus, and will remain so. Last year I had created some strength bench marks to shoot towards, and to be honest, I actually lost some strength. The way the year worked out with all the running races made it hard to make big gains in the gym. But I still spent a lot of time there and feel healthier for it!
And a few from Strava. This shows a pretty even split, I’d like to see biking increase a little.
And this shows the numbers here don’t line up exactly with the ones above, but they are pretty close:
Fairly even distribution on climbing, but the summer months when at the coast or Puerto Rico hurt!
This one is funny – it shows top 1% which I thought was impressive. But then I saw someone else post a 1% — yet she had nearly 3 times as many hours tracked as I did! So there are some real outliers in that top 1%
And that’s a wrap. I probably need to change the goals to time based (other than elevation), or just delete some of them and focus on the big two — total time and total elevation. Otherwise I sometimes track to those more than I should.
Plans this year – SMR relay run in April as an ultra (6-man team) and Barkley Fall Classic is it right now as far as races, but there are other things under consideration that may pop up. Just nothing that can be announced yet. :-)
