I’ll summarize just December now but will review my entire 2023 year and plans for 2024 soon. That will have to wait until next time.
The last three months have been a bit up and down. November was an outlier due to my illness and running the JFK 50. Without those factors it would have been similar to October. Here are the details for comparison.
| Stats | October | November | December |
| Hours | 40 | 24 | 47 |
| Miles | 251 | 127 | 241 |
| Runs | 22 | 11 | 19 |
| Workouts | 3 | 1 | 4 |
I’m happy I averaged 5 activities per week and met my weekly mileage goal each month. The focus this month was on speed and strength, so there were many running ‘workouts’. Those consisted of tempo runs, interval sessions on the track, and longer intervals on the trails. Many of the running workouts were followed by easy, long-ish runs the next day to help ‘absorb’ the work completed and solidify the metabolic and strength adaptations from the harder efforts. This has been a key component of the training my coach has been prescribing. From this point forward I’ll be heading into a larger running volume block to build the endurance I’ll need for the race. There are only nine weeks before my race! I feel really good in my preparations so far. Looking forward to the build up of miles in January and February. I’m not particularly looking forward to many long runs in the coldest part of the year, but I’ve got a good collection of cold-weather gear so I’m ready.
Stay tuned for my 2023 summary. 2024 is going to be awesome!