2016 was an interesting year for me in many ways. After 12 years of living in Veszprém, I moved 80 km north to the city of Győr. Understandably, many things changed in my life, and running / cycling / etc. was not an exception from that. Another big change was, that our local running group started to brand itself as VeszpRUN, and we had a lot of fun with that :-) But let's have everything in its order.
Total mileage
Last year I made a neat post about how I performed in 2015 compared to 2014. I filled out the same table this year as well:
Well, as it is obvious from the picture, the results are diverse. Let's start with the bad news: I could not get back on track with skating unfortunately. Also, even though I managed to swim across lake Balaton (5.2 km) during the summer, I did not swim much after/before that. I'm not so mad about mountain biking and elliptic training, I just simply did not have the tools for them. Walking and hiking was ok, nothing much to tell about them. There is a slight increase in cycling, which is thanks to my new desk. In the next year I expect it to grow higher, as I'll be using it through the whole year. Rowing is interesting. It seems I did pretty good, but most of that was in January and February on a rowing machine... in Veszprem. Here, in Gyor, I've not yet found the place where I can do that, so next year will be tricky. However, Gyor has rivers, so I'll be able to kayak a lot during the summer hopefully. And last but not least: running was really good this year, I managed to get in 500 km more than last year. The main reason behind that is the fact that I got comfortable with 40-50 km trail runs, and doing them each weekend. Hopefully it will be the same for 2017.
PBs and other achievements
2015 was a very successful year in terms of personal bests. I did my first IronMan, ran my Marathon PB, just to mention the two most important ones. I can't really show something of the same caliber for this year. I did my first 6h competition, where I performed according to my expectations. The biggest achievement was probably, that I managed to run a 50k and 30k hiking trip right after each other, so my longest distance is around 78 km now.
VeszpRUN is born
Together with a good friend of mine, we started to build a local running group in Veszprem back in 2013. Slowly but steadily the group got bigger. Not too big, but what is more important for me, there are steady people, who are often there, and we become very good friends. We have runs together twice a week, and in general, the goal is to have a fun run while discussing what happened with the others, etc. Often we continue that in a local tea house.
After two years it was time to give a name to our group. After a democratic vote the winner emerged: VeszpRUN. Then a designer was hired to make logos for our team, and these became the results:
The next step was to design our team running shirts. We decided to have the fluorescent orange as a team color, and these were the first shirts made for us:
Since then many shirts were ordered, and You can find these on the streets of Veszprem :-) We also made a website (in Hungarian), which has all the important information about our weekly runs, fun runs, t-shirts, personal bests, etc.
What happened with the blog?
Unfortunately I did not have as much time for the blog, as I wanted. Still, I think I moved forward in some ways.
- The current design is I think finally acceptable.
- We passed 10000 pageviews.
- When I visited Croatia, the post about that reached a never-before pageview over 700
- The post about my medal hanger got even further with 1500+ views
I know that these numbers are fairly low, but for me they are really nice. I don't have many followers on facebook/google+/twitter, but that's ok. If there are a few, who like the posts, that's good enough for me.
Plans for 2017
Last but not least, the plans for the future... Regarding running, my main goal for 2017 is to get the 100 km done. I'm positive I can do that, and then I'll see if I'm really into these ultra-distances or not. Regarding the blog, I'll be trying to write more and more enjoyable posts, but we will see. I have a long list of ideas, so I'll only have to find the time to deal with them.
