First up on the year in review is the meditation practice. I started out doing short meditation sessions sort of randomly late last year. I’d only remember to do it occasionally, maybe a couple times a week. While that’s better than zero, it never became a habit or a thing that I would think about consistently. Not to mention that meditation itself is a skill you need to hone over time with experience to get the benefits out of it. Committed practice is the only way it feels useful. This year I set a target to do some meditation each...

The goal at the start of 2019 was to hit 500 miles running this year. Tonight’s run pushed me up to 602 miles for the year, with a couple of weeks left to go.

150+ miles more than any prior year

Through the mid-summer time I was only averaging 42 to 45 miles a month, which was barely keeping me over the pace mark week to week. I would log my runs and watch the moving plus/minus number I track and see myself float above...

Inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, I started posting something every day here last year on October 4th. The 1 year mark passed by and I didn’t even notice. It’s become such a part of my mental routine to keep up with that it’s become pretty painless.

Most of my posts are topics I find interesting or links I run across. I find myself zeroing in on themes that tend to appear in my reading patterns. Through the process I’ve also come up with a few recurring “series” type posts to do regularly:

Today I finished my first half marathon. Felt great until about mile 10 when things got a lot harder. The final mile was painful, but I got it done and even ended up pushing it to under a 10 minute mile average pace (a goal I decided to shoot for around mile 8 when I was still feeling good and thought I could push myself).

• Finish Time: 2h 09m
• Average Pace: 9:52 / mile

Time for a week off!

Jason turned me onto this Chrome extension for Strava data analysis called Elevate. It’s a pretty amazing tool that adds deep analytics on top of the already-rich data Strava provides natively as part of their Summit plan.

In addition to having its own metrics like this fitness/freshness curve, it overlays additional metrics into the individual activity pages on the Strava website. My favorite ones are this (which Strava has its own simpler version of) and the year-over-year comparison graph, which lets you see your progression in total mileage...

I’ve committed myself to running my first half marathon, coming up in October. This sort of happened on a challenge from a couple folks at work. I didn’t really intend to throw something like this into the schedule that could interrupt my regular goal progress, but in looking at Strava’s training plans, their half marathon one starts mid August and scales up in a way I think I can tackle relatively comfortably. It starts off with easy runs in the 40-60 minute range, with weekend long runs up to 75-90 minutes. I’ll need to bring the...

As I’ve written before on this topic, separating goal-setting from habit-forming is important to do if you want to have success at either. Often people set goals without defining the daily behaviors that will enable them to achieve said goals.

I felt the goals I set this year were firmly in the SMART category, but it’s required diligence not to fall off the wagon of the daily habits. I set some big numbers down (importantly, only in a few areas), so I needed to break down those into daily and weekly patterns to pace...

For no particular reason I decided to try and run every street segment in my neighborhood. A while ago I saw this project from ultrarunner Rickey Gates where he ran every single street in San Francisco. Of course my neighborhood is a fair bit smaller, but attempting it will keep things interesting. You can already see the progress zigzagging through the street spurs of waterfront property, with canals in between each row of houses.

I’ve been doing a route regularly out onto Venetian Isles. This will mix it up and give...