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New year resolution of 2015 in retrospective

To be honest, I have never had any explicit resolutions for 2015 (or any of the previous years for that matter), but I've had a simple ambition, so to speak:

By the end of the new year, I will have accumulated at least as many kilometers from each type of activity as I did in 2014.

So, have I made it?
The short answer is no, however...


Let's go back to the beginning: it was the June of 2013, when I started doing some sports again on a regular basis after a 2-3 year long break. This makes 2014 the first whole year of my sport life renaissance.  Luckily, this was already in the era of smartphones and activity tracking apps, so a bit more than a year ago I was able to post this picture to summarize all my activity data of 2014 (that I've stored on RunKeeper):



I was not proud for all of the numbers, but they were good to set the limit for 2015. I wanted to improve myself, to do more. Moreover, this annual review revealed several interesting facts:
  • If I'd have been a little bit more focused, I could have done 2014 km in 2014.
  • I do a considerably huge amount of casual walking during my everyday life compared to my sport activities.
  • I've seriously forgotten about hiking, that has been my major sport for many years. I definitely wanted to improve on that one. 
  • I barely covered a longer distance with my bike than running, although it is much easier to collect the kilometers while riding
  • I did an amazing job with skating (most of it inline skating), considering that I've started skating just recently.
  • Swimming... I haven't done any swimming for a decade before, so 15k could be considered ok, if I haven't had a half Ironman triathlon competition in June, for which I should have had a little bit more training probably.
  • MTB, Ellyptic, Rowing are weak, but I did not bother too much about that as I have no access to them on a regular basis, so it was more the result of circumstances than my laziness
With all these in mind I set off to overcome all these at least a bit in 2015. After each month I copied the summary report from RunKeeper to an ODS file, and looked at the data, if I'm above or below the number I should have time-proportionally. So I was constantly aware, where I should lay more focus in the next month, in order not to get "behind schedule".  

When I came back from Morocco on the 1st of November, I had 2 months left, and I had to face some serious numbers left to do like, 400+ km of running, 350+ km of skating.  Then came the last month, and I made an other photo, about my progress:



I could rest for some sports like cycling, swimming, rowing, hiking. Running and casual walking was tight with the schedule but doable. Despite the poor percentage, I had no worries about MTB and elliptic, I just had to get my hands on a bike and an elliptic trainer. And... I've given up on skating. I was late. The weather was already cold and wet enough to render the roads unsafe for inline skating, but not cold enough to freeze the lakes for ice skating. 

By the end of  2015 the numbers looked like this, thanks to some last minute indoor training and a 35 km mountain bike ride on the 31st of December:


The numbers speak for themselves, but I am still not satisfied with hiking or swimming for example. The biggest change was obviously rowing, that I started doing in 2015, but I am also happy about the increase of the kilometers in cycling. 

So, You may ask:
Was it worth? Am I disappointed by failing? Will I try to do the same for 2016?

Yes, definitely not, and hell yeah! 

I know, I'll have to focus more on skating in the summer, and I know I can not keep increasing the accumulated distances  indefinitely. But I believe there is still a lot of  room for improvement, so I'll try to do my best.

What about You? Any similar plans for 2016? Will You beat the 2015 version of Yourself?

P.S. The calories are counted in the unit of Túró Rudis, that is a unique Hungarian sweet, You must taste if You haven't done that before.


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About Unknown

Amateur fun runner, geek, hiker.