Year over Year Comparison

Last year I had my first committed triathlon training year. I kept very detailed records of my training and races. This year I did the same, and made a goal of doing my first two 70.3 distances (Liberty, Chisago.) My desire to do well at those races, as well as just improve overall lead me to break from my self-prescribed three month break about a month early.

With a full month left of training this year leading up to the last race I figured I could do an early assessment of where I stand, purely by the numbers, compared to last year.

Last year my season started in April and ended in August. So five full months - honestly I probably trained through the entire winter too to do my first two half marathons, but I don't have detailed records of those workouts, so for the sake of ease we'll just say those are accurate dates.

Last year's season totals looked like this

	Distance	Time
Swim	83,400 yards	26:40 hours
Bike	1,207 miles	56:42 hours
Run	233 miles	22:52 hours

I started ramping up into a fully structured program on November 21. The date-to-day numbers for that look like this

	Distance	Time
Swim	258,720 yards	79:30 hours
Bike	2,100 miles	124:50 hours
Run	533 miles	82 hours

Just for apples to apples, if I compare only the same dates

	Distance	Time
Swim	139,040 yards	41 hours
Bike	1,600 miles	89 hours
Run	306 miles	46:25 hours

 There appears to be somewhat of an anomaly here - the running. It looks like I'm saying that in just over double the amount of time I only ran 1/3 further. I'm thinking that may be because at the start (November - mid-January) I was doing some pretty easy running. Taking plenty of walk breaks, stuff like that.

At times this year it really seemed like I was working out a ton. I clearly put in more time, I'll dig into the fruit of all of the labor some time later. But when Ironman WI came along this year I saw a tweet go by "Since signing up for #IMWI last year, I have trained 733 hours (ave 2h per day). I've biked 7,309 miles, run 1,265 miles and swam 320 miles." He went on to finish in 10hrs got 16th in his AG and 62nd overall. But still, that's a TON of training. That is some major commitment.