Goodbye 2010

You know what’s sad?  I spent a good twenty-five minutes sitting in front of a blank screen trying to come up with a really clever title for this year in review post and couldn’t come up with anything better than Goodbye 2010.  Lame. 

It seems like everyone does a year in review post and I hate being the same as everyone else but how can you pass up the old year in review post?  You can’t, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve done a year in review post every single year of this blog’s stinking existence.  Yes, some of those links are duplicitous because this blog has only existed for 3½ years but it seemed more emphatic to link every word.  And just because I disappeared for 6 months of the year is no reason to not review the year, believe it or not I was still running even though I was not here telling you about it.  On top of that the year in review post is an easy one to write.  You simply repost your goals from last year, giving excuses for the ones you missed and patting yourself on the back for the ones you accomplished.  The only thing you really have to work at is an introductory paragraph... well would you look at that... it practically wrote itself.  (If only the title would write itself too, lazy title!)

2010 Goals (as posted here)

Post more frequently this year - I swear I’m not making that one up.  That was the first goal I posted last year and I even talked about writing 200 posts this year.  Obviously 33 posts is not going to be enough to call this a success.  Not off to a good start.

Run a sub 50 minute 10k - Nope.  0 for 2.  I only ran one 10k and I ran it in 54:something.  I don’t even care enough to go look it up or link to the post where I discussed it.  Haven’t I already linked to enough posts?

Set a new Half Marathon PR - YES!  I am awesome!  1 for 3!  No linking to that post either since it is the previous post.

Set a new 5k PR - Nope.  Nuh-Uh.  Didn’t do it.  1 for 4.  This is getting depressing.  Why do people write these posts again?

Run some different races Yes!  2 for 5!  I ran the Crossroads Half-Marathon and a couple new 5ks that I hadn’t run before.

Wait?  That’s it?  Where are all the other goals?  I really only set 5 goals for last year?  What’s truly unbelievable is that in almost every year that I’ve set goals (except for 2010 I guess) I’ve included ‘win an age group award’ as one of the goals.  In 2010 I didn’t include it as a goal and it actually happened.  I took 1st place in my age group at the Hawk Hustle 5k.  Why wasn’t that a goal this year?  What was I thinking?  You know what, I’m going to go ahead and give myself an extra credit point for winning that age group award which puts me at 3 for 5.  And now that I think of it, PRing the half marathon was a HUGE deal to me and really deserves to be worth 2 points instead of 1 which brings me to 4 out of 5.  So there you have it.  I scored 80% on the year for my 2010 goals, that’s a solid B+ (I’m grading on a curve).  Wow!  What an awesome year 2010 was for me.  I really rocked it.  Here’s to 2011.  I’ll call it a success if it can be even half as successful as 2010 was.

2009: The Year in Review

It’s time for another one of those ‘year in review’ posts that everyone has been doing, but this one is different because it’s long past the time for year in review posts. At this rate I’ll get around to my new year’s resolutions in February and start setting goals for this year in March or April.

The biggest accomplishment of the year was finishing my first marathon back in January. After that the year pretty much went downhill. To be honest with you I didn’t even remember what my goals for this year were until I went back and looked them up moments ago. That probably speaks volumes to why I didn’t accomplish many of them. Let’s break out Viper’s Big Red FAIL Stamp and take a look back at my list of 2009 goals (originally posted here).

• Get faster. FAIL (Zero new PRs this year.)
• Don’t get slower. FAIL (Technically the marathon was a PR but only because it was my first.)
• Run a sub 50 minute 10K. FAIL
• Win an age group award, and by win I mean take first, second or third, I’m really not that picky. FAIL
• Shave my 5K. As the host of the SY5K Challenge it would be embarrassing for me to get slower. Check! (My smooth time was faster than my stubble time, though neither were PRs.)
• Set a new PR at the half marathon distance. FAIL
• Not sign up for another marathon. Check!

I’ve been running for almost five years now and up until 2009 I was getting faster regardless of how much speedwork or effort I put forth. It was just a given that I was going to set new PRs every year and I think it probably made me a little complacent. It turns out I’m going to have to actually work harder to get faster in the future and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I prefer to have things handed to me with minimal input on my part, it’s one of the things that makes me such a good employee.

2009 will be known as the Year of the Marathon for me. Five years ago when I started running, my only goal was to post a faster time in the annual Bolder Boulder 10K, I never set out to run a marathon. In fact whenever anyone suggested that I should run a marathon I would explicitly tell them that I had no interest in running that far. I still have no interest in running that far, but I’m glad that I did it last year. My biggest accomplishment in 2009 was finishing a marathon and my second biggest accomplishment was not signing up for another one. I’m an inspiration, for sure.

Year in Review

Christmas is almost here, which means it’s time to look back at the goals we set at the beginning of the year and see how we’ve fared. Fortunately for me I couldn’t find a goal-setting post at the beginning of the year which means that I didn’t fail to meet any of my goals, if that makes sense (it made sense in my head). Last year I wrote a year in review post talking about all that I had accomplished but this year just doesn’t have a finished feel to it, and it probably won’t until I run the marathon on January 18th. Ironically enough, it was my year in review post last year where I first mentioned that I might consider running a marathon. I really wish that someone would have stepped in and stopped me right then and there. So instead of taking the time to craft a well thought out post about this past year, here are some bullet points.

Things that I’ve done this year that you probably don’t care about:

• Set new PRs in the 5K, 10K, and Half Marathon.
• Participated in my first podcast.
• Signed up for my first marathon.
• Started the SY5K Challenge.
• Ran a race in a Gorilla suit, a lifelong goal of mine.
• Sought out an evil arch nemesis.
• Found one. (Except, replace evil with annoying.) As of right now Viper has re-claimed all 4 PRs, 5K, 10K, 13.1 and 26.2 but I’ll have my sights set on several of them for next year. For those of you wondering, I will not be eating my sweaty Red Sox hat. “I’ll eat my hat,” is just an expression to convey disbelief, no one really thinks that you’re going to literally eat your hat. It’s kind of like when I tell each and every one of you to kiss my derriere, I don’t expect you to literally do it, just figuratively. I will however admit that Viper proved me wrong, he did indeed run 32 miles last week. Bravo and congratulations for putting in some marathon type training in order to reach an arbitrary mileage goal that you’ll probably still fall short of. In fact... yeah... if Viper reaches 1,000 miles for the year, I’ll eat my shorts.*

That’s about all I have the energy for right now. I’m currently in the heart of marathon training and it doesn’t feel like a good time for careful retrospection and summation, plus “careful retrospection and summation” so doesn’t sound like something that you’d expect to find here at Half-Fast anyway.

*No I won’t, because it’s just an expression.

The Requisite “Year In Review” Post

If you write a blog or a column or are the programming director for a TV station then you know that the easiest way to fill in content at this time of the year when you probably don’t feel like working is to do the “Year In Review” thing. You might call it ‘the best of’ or ‘the worst of’ or the ‘top 10 moments in 2007’ but it’s all the same thing. It’s an easy post/TV show. You talk a little about some significant events, you link to those articles/show old footage, you reminisce, and then you wrap up by talking about the upcoming year. Hey presto! You’ve got yourself a blog post.

This is my “2007: Year in Review” post. The only difference between my review and all the others you will read is that I’m sexier than everyone else that’s doing it, but since I won’t be posting any pictures of myself in this entry I guess that doesn’t really matter.

On April 1st, 2007 I started Half-Fast. I felt that April Fools Day was an appropriate date for what I had in mind for this blog and I stand by that decision. The only bad thing about it is that when Half-Fast turns one on April 1st 2008 I won’t know whether to do a celebratory post or an April Fools Day joke post. Ahhh, who am I kidding? I’m going for the joke post all the way. Half-Fast has turned out pretty much exactly the way I envisioned it and I look forward to bigger and better things in the coming year so be sure to stay tuned.

Over this past year my thoughts on running have changed as dramatically as my goals have. My original profile on this blog stated that I intended to run only the Bolder Boulder 10K every year, as I had done the previous 2 years. Of the 3 years that I’ve been a runner, this has been the year that I’ve taken it more seriously than before. This is the first year I have entered other races, and is the first year that I’ve followed any kind of training plan that included speedwork or tempo runs. I ran my first half marathon this year in under 2 hours, looking back this is probably what I am most proud of as a runner. I’m also proud of the fact that every race this year was a PR, admittedly some by default, but I continue to improve as a runner and hope to continue this trend through 2008.

Also, I never thought I’d run a marathon, but now I can see one on the distant horizon. Yes, just one.