We're most of the way through February, so what better time to get you up to date with what happened back in January? Welcome to the first Toppy Roundup post: January 2023.
Training
January this year was all about the training, so we'll lead with that. And the stats are awesome:
301 km for the month. That's more than I did any month in 2022. My last 300+ km month was August 2021. I suffered hugely last year with being inconsistent and getting into big races with insufficient mileage. It's nice to get the year off to a good start.
89.7 km in the last full week of January. Going back to find a week bigger than this ... and I get to January 2021 - the last full week before I broke my ankle.
My paces in workouts were hit-and-miss over the month. But that's no surprise as most of November and December were light on the training front. In the first month of 2023, we want to start building the base to the fitness that will see a raft of PBs over the course of the year. And it looked good.
Racing
There was only one race in January, and that was a 10k in Victoria Park.
Did it go well? Did it go poorly?
Yes.
On one hand, my stated goal is to set PBs across 5k, 10k, half and full marathons this year. So, ideally, I would be checking off the first of these distances.
But the 10k is the hardest of these, as it's my strongest PB. The race was also early in the month, so I had just come off Christmas running, which came after a very icy week in December that saw little running, which came after my recovery for the New York marathon, which came after recovering from COVID.
Was I realistically going to better my best PB off ten weeks of little training? No.
What I did do was run a sub-40 for the first time since breaking my ankle.
Again, a great start to the year, and a good sign - I ran slower 10ks in the lead up to my current marathon, half marathon, and 5k PBs. Combined with my current training, I'm in a good place to set a lot of PBs this year.
But there's some building to do before the 10k PB falls.
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