Wow, did January fly by? Time is sure moving quickly and with my commitment to doing a few things differently in my training I am also taking a monthly look back at it and summarizing what went well and what didn't. The hope is that this will allow me to auto correct as I go into the summer and build to Ironman Coeur D'Alene in August.
As an overview, January went pretty well in most regards. I like that I got a little consistency in getting back into the gym to strength train. I had a total of 4:15 lifting in the past month and more importantly I believe I am past that incredible amount of soreness that occurs when you first start back. Man, do I hate that feeling and so glad I am past it. Here is the pie chart of the percentage of time I spent on each discipline:
You can see 10% of my time was spent strength training. I like that. The next area to discuss is my running and this is one area I am not satisfied with and need to increase. The issue to date has been a very tight groin muscle that is leading to knee pain. My sports doctor diagnosed this last fall and I am working on it to relieve the pain. The lack of time running is not too concerning yet but this needs to improve. My total mileage for the month was 30.7 miles which obviously is not enough for Ironman.
Moving on to swimming - this is a good total for January. Almost one third of my time was spent here and my total distance was almost 36,000 yards and 12.5 hours. This amount of training is almost where I would want it for summer time leading to August so I am happy here.
The last area is cycling - 269 miles and 18 hours. Not bad and the percentage is similar to what I will see in the summer but the volume will go up. With all of our rain I didn't lose many training days here so that is good news as well. Definitely need to crank up the volume but I am ok with this.
Looking forward, the key is to slowly build up the running and work on loosening up the groin muscle and reduce the pain in my knee. I like the trend there so keep your fingers crossed for me.
Have a great February training and I would love to hear how you are doing. Take care and be safe!