I started this year with the plan to be more active – no surprise here, you must have heard this as an objective when the new year starts – and my plan was anchored in what I hope to be a number of races this year (half and full marathons). To quantify my commitment for running, I said that I need to run more than 2022 km this year. I know it’s not a lot, I have friends who casually go beyond 3500km, or even beyond 5000km – but I need to be realistic .. I’m a rather slow endurance runner and I don’t know if I could dedicate so much time to running during the year.
For example, if I would like to count 5000km run by the end of the year, with an average pace of 6:30min/km, that would mean 541.6 hours – almost 90 minutes every day – realistically dedicating with preparation and shower and everything more than 2 hours every day…
Hmm, that’s not realistic in my case, because I like also cycling and hiking and .. I love my family as well 🙂
Anyway, looking back at January 2022, the start is promising .. I managed to run 216km without putting a lot of stress on myself, it was fun and I assorted that with other activities (maybe not that much cross-training as needed). With this amount of running, I’m on track to hit my objective for this year, but what I’m very happy about is the
Last year, January was a bit different as I was recovering after Covid-19 and I had to stay inside half of the month, so no running – I don’t have a treadmill, but only a smart bike trainer which I used a bit.
During January, I enjoyed training by power using my Polar Vantage V2 and Stryd – it was alright, I had one incident with Polar counting so many more km in the first seconds of the run, but other than that I was really happy with the Vantage V2 – light and easy to charge.
The reports and graphs are easy to use and understand, even though the Polar ecosystem is not without issues or shortcomings
At the end of January, I switched back (again) to Garmin Fenix because from time to time I just remember that the battery life matters so much to me and not having to charge the watch every 3 day is something that gives me confort. Also, the sync with Garmin is so much faster and seamless with the Wifi support as well. My indecision between Garmin and Polar deserves a longer conversation, some of my reasons to keep on switching were already mentioned in other older posts.
Be well and happy running!
Liviu Nastasa 