It’s never too late to review the past year, right? This is not going to be one of these pretty chronological accounts of what I did each month. (See a perfect example here, published on the 1st of January. Boah.)

2010 was the first year for me where endurance was my main sports activity, after almost 20 years of badminton. I still played in the team championships until the end of March (the season culminated in our glorious relegation to the second league), and after that, it was endurance only.

2010 in training

I started recording my activities on BeginnerTriathlete.com (mainly because this guy recommended it) at the end of May. These are my monthly total distances in swimming (purple), biking (green) and running (yellow):

• There hasn’t been much cycling. The, um, weather wasn’t always great. I did some spinning classes though!
• I was in the army for four weeks in August so I couldn’t do much then.

This of course totally ignores what I’ve been doing apart from swimming, cycling and running. These are my times spent per month on all kinds of sports, i.e., strength training (blue) and “other” (red):

• I did the Four Days Marches of Nijmegen in July, that’s why there’s a huge part of “other”.
• The other significant red portion is from snowboarding and cross-country skiing in December.
• I’m very lazy when it comes to strength training.

In September, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 310XT. Since then, I don’t have to map out my courses post-workout anymore to know how far I’ve gone, and I also use Garmin Connect to keep track of my training:

I actually only keep using BT because there I can track what distance I’ve put on which running shoe, and some graphs are quicker available than on GC. For the rest, it’s Garmin all the way, and I love looking at courses I’ve done in Google Earth (example: Silvesterlauf in December)

or to study heart rate, pace, elevation profile and cadence curves (example: Laufsporttag Winterthur two weeks ago).

I’ll keep using Garmin Connect because that’s where my workouts upload to by default, but I’ll eventually replace BT by either TrainingPeaks or SportTracks, and maybe I’ll start using dailymile in addition.

So from the end of May on, I’ve recorded for 2010:

• 30:40:53 h:m:s swimming (33.675 km), and you’re not allowed to calculate my “pace”
• 25:00:38 biking (614.31 km)
• 61:40:22 running (656.13 km)
• 09:12:00 strength/circuit training
• 04:25:15 spinning class
• 28:28:16 marching in the Netherlands
• 02:59:33 snowboarding (net time, would be more like 18 hours gross)
• 00:56:40 cross-country skiing

2010 in swimming

Swimming and I, that’s what I would call a hate/hate relationship. I realised that water was not for me when I was about two years old. Later, I managed to not become a decent swimmer despite my mom being a swim teacher for many years (and me attending countless classes of hers). I passed the Crab and Sea Horse tests, but Frog (not to mention Penguin) was out of my league.

In the army, I had the opportunity to do lifeguard training and become certified for the first level. That means I was able to do 400 m breast stroke within something like 10:45. My swimming was at the level of “at least not drowning”.

Then, I did nothing about it for ten years, after which I decided to do triathlons. I’m confident that at one point in time I’ll be able to swim decently, and at least I’m already very used to going to the pool. Even though it’s my very clear weakness, I don’t want to skip it and resort to duathlon, because swimming is what makes triathlon a full body workout.

Also, all of the coolest events like Gigathlon require you to swim, so there. I must become proficient.

2010 in racing

Because training is much easier for me when I have something to train for, I like doing lots of races.

To be precise, I ran 214.24 km in 16 footraces (from 2.7 km plus a bottle of prosecco up to some half marathons) as well as 0.5/15.1/3.8 km swim/bike/run in one triathlon. I started documenting my races here from that triathlon on.

2010 in triathlon

I did just one sprint distance triathlon in 2010, after which the tri season was over. It was the Tägi Tri (see race report). Apart from taking a shortcut on the bike, let this picture tell you the story of my race:

I’ll be back! And swimming in a non-empty pool!

2010 in stuff

Every race has more or less cool giveaways. Cool are: pieces of functional clothing. Less cool are: a wallet I’ll never use, a wristwarmer I’ll never use, and so on. After this year, I can dress multiply in race shirts and even shorts:

Plus I have wristwarmers for all three arms, hats for both heads, two tiny towels and a little backpack to put all the awesomeness inside:

Anyway. 2010 will be filed under “starting out”. 2011 is going to be more structured, more triathlon-oriented and containing a few real highlights. I’ve mentioned before that I’ll run the NYC marathon, for example. I’ll write a separate post about my race plans soon. (As I have been planning to for about two months.)