Friday, January 1, 2010

Going Ballistic: 300,000 Vertical Feet for 2009

With a strange off-season injury keeping me sidelined from running for much of the late fall and early winter, my hopes of logging 3,000 miles in 2009 fell well short at 2,500.

Still, I didn't let that stop me from taking the New Year's Day tour of my Attackpoint.org training log. Along with the requisite hindsight answers to musings like "don't know why I was so tired today" (because you ran 120 miles in the previous week, Sherlock), I was pleasantly surprised to see how much climbing I'd done in the past year. Including racing and training, the total came to an almost-round 300,252 feet. The biggest months, of course, were in the heat of the season. March, April, June, July, and September each posted over 30,000 feet. August came to 26,000.

While I'm unsure where this falls on the vert spectrum, from a personal standpoint it's a much bigger number than I really thought it would be. So as I sit here and write, waiting for the all clear to run, I'll rest a little easier sensing that all the hours and miles and vert posted in '09 should give me a bit of a cushion heading in to a late start to 2010.

No comments: