In years gone by, I've started the year with a post reviewing the previous year's training and racing and finished off with my plans for that year. Not this year because we all know 2020 was a complete write off thanks to COVID-19 🦠 so I'm not going to summarise the year at all - there's nothing to write about. Instead I'm going to concentrate on the future only.

I'm taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to racing and am not planning anything solid yet. I have confirmation of running the Run to the Sea 50k in March and the Chicago marathon in October but only because they were deferred from last year and they've already confirmed they plan to go ahead this year and have confirmed my entries, though time will tell. Other than possibly getting confirmation of the New York marathon going ahead and my deferred entry accepted, I won't be entering anything else until I'm sure we'll be able to get there and do the event.

Whilst not much is certain right now, I can make training a certainty and can experiment whilst I keep myself sane and healthy, and hopefully finish the year a strong and faster runner now I have my own kettlebells and Concept2 rower to mix things up.

I finished off last year following the FIRST 5K plan from the Runner's World Run Less, Run Faster: Become a Faster, Stronger Runner with the Revolutionary 3-Run-a-Week Training Program book with three days of running, combined with the sessions from The Pete Plan for three days of rowing, and found this very enjoyable and manageable. My left shin/calf still gave me troubles, but I found thorough stretching after every run and multiple times during the non-running days worked a treat and allowed me to run pain-free on the scheduled run days and live with mild discomfort on the others. The single complete rest day was also a nice change from my previous training plans and I didn't feel like I was slacking.

It's based off this that I'm going to start this year continuing with that experiment, but will bump the mileage up to closer to the marathon programme (I miss the longer weekend runs) and use power instead of pace for the running sessions. I'll also be throwing in at least two Simple & Sinister kettlebell sessions a week. I'll tweak things as the year progresses and maybe it'll be the programme I use for Chicago which I'll then smash and set a new PB (gotta remain positive 😁).

Other than training, and maybe racing, the only other thing I plan on doing is blogging more. I've finally got things set up such that I can post smaller Tweet-sized notes here first and then have it syndicate out to Twitter. This means more random thoughts and tiny posts in my feed, but at least it's on my site and not disappearing into Twitter's silo.