Real David H.

Somewhere along the way in my blogging I stopped doing some sort of monthly reflection. And now that I’m back in full training mode, I think I’ve done myself a disservice doing that. Even in a down time, I think I should take a look back at the previous four plus weeks to look at the lessons learned, enjoy my successes one more time, figure out what went wrong and then forge ahead.

That being said, this January has been one of the craziest months I’ve experienced in a long time for many different reasons. It didn’t start well at all — I had a horrible cold and didn’t get in my first run until Jan. 4 — all of two miles. My big goal for the month was to do 31 exercises in 31 days — “31 in 31” as I called it — but that kind of fell apart after my big mountain run and was pretty beat up for a few days. However, I think it failed for more reasons than that — I didn’t plan well enough for it. Next time I try to do something like that, I have to plan it out better. Poor planning leads to poor results and I honestly did a poor job with that.

For a while this month, I was rolling along with the 100 push-ups program, but after falling in the mountains, my elbow was pretty sore for a few days, so I decided to take a week off with that. Things feel better now, so I hope that in February I can finally roll along with the program again. January surely wasn’t a complete disaster with this though — I did 591 push-ups overall.

January’s biggest highlight has been with my running. When Jan. 1 hit, I decided that it was time to move on from the previous two years. For me 2010 was a complete new start and that there was no need to compare this year to previous years. It’s not the easiest thing to do that, but I’ve pretty much have. It’s quite liberating to look ahead instead of looking behind. I think a once-a-month reflection, and a big once-a-year review, is enough.

So with running, I can simply look at my mileage — 75.3 — and be happy with that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled about passing 75 miles for the first month of the year. But those 75-plus miles have been through a bad cold, through cold weather, in shorts, in pants, in rain, in some pretty decent weather, through ice over a mountain and in the past two days through snow. I’ve done things I had no idea I could do, and I’ve done many things I simply wouldn’t normally do. Yesterday’s 2.5-mile run through snow and temperatures in the mid-teens put the icing on the cake for this month.

The next time I’m ready to make an excuse, all I have to do is look back at January 2010 to know that no excuse is good enough. It’s hard to believe all this has happened in the span of 31 days … here’s to the next 334 being just as great.

Here are a few photos from yesterday’s snow run. By the time it was over, we were just shy of another foot of snow.