Oh yeah, 2016 is over or something

Already?

This week was back to real life after almost two weeks off. We squeezed in a little bit of fun celebrating a friend’s birthday Tuesday evening (and eating way too much amazing slow-roasted chicken), but yesterday and today have been work, errands, run, eat, food prep, go to bed way too late. At least tomorrow is Friday already.

Since we’re almost a week into 2017 it seems a bit silly to look back at 2016 now. It wasn’t a great year for me nor my training. The highlight was pacing my husband to his first half marathon, a fun Black Friday trail race a few weeks later, and successfully building my running mileage back up from 17 in January to 96 in December.

But I didn’t complete a single multisport event after I skipped my usual spring triathlon and DNF’d a swim race I have done three times already. This the first calendar year since 2009 I didn’t run a marathon, and it was my lowest mileage year since at least 2011, when I was out for months with a tibial stress fracture. It’s the first year in four I didn’t break 1,000 miles (although hitting 666 miles is pretty funny). I struggled with health problems this year, which I believe was the cause of the anxiety I had swimming, and am only now feeling better after cutting out some foods I am apparently allergic to (wtf!) and switching up medication.

Ugh.

Before I dive back in (heh) to the multisport lifestyle, I admit that I’m having a kind of triathlon existential crisis. If I’m not very good at swimming and am a crappy cyclist, why do I keep doing this? If I can stay in shape just running (which, admittedly, I am not very good at either), lifting weights, practicing yoga, and doing the odd random sport or athletic pursuit, than why don’t I?

I don’t have an answer to that yet. One of my January goals is to swim and bike once per week. If I really, really hate it, I don’t have to do it anymore. This is a hobby, not a job. But… I suspect that after a few spins and swims I’ll start to feel The Itch again. Maybe I will make some ridiculous goals for myself. Maybe I won’t. There is still a lot of 2017 left to experience and we'll see what happens.