I’m a little late with 2011s Eddington Review largely due to my first family christmas in three years and then deciding that bike total ascent is a good thing to have an Eddington Number for. This resulted in all this morning having great fun updating my database and back populating the data I have. I’ve only had a garmin since 2010 so thats all I’ve used. I may go back and put in data that I know but that will be limited to races and routes that I’ve subsequently done with a garmin. For now the results are from 2010 so there may some revision to these figures in future.

Still not found anyone else that tracks Eddington Numbers. I find it of interest that I found them so fascinating but apparently no one else does other than Arthur Eddington though I do notice my definition is a little stricter since I use individual rides rather than total distance in a day.

SWIMMING

A solid year with swimming but still many of my figures are close to terminal values. Virtually all daily and weekly life to date figures are other than minutes which should not be terminal until 300 is reached when it will start getting harder. Without access to a decent pool I don’t see the daily increasing though a single spell in somewhere like Club La Santa would almost certainly spur me to a couple of double swim days to tick it over to 10.  The most likely area for me to better on the annual front is the daily minutes. I have access to four 90 minute sessions per week in Taunton so even 22 weeks of hitting all of them would get me over the previous best of 84 minutes. Similarly weekly KM should see 17 beaten as it’s reasonable for me to be getting 18-20km done weekly. Upping the LTD 22km for week may be tricky as I’m not heading to a public session just to push a weeks volume over 22km.

BIKING

Progress here has been really hit last year with my 100 hour cap. Improving the headline Eddington Number of daily bike miles is a little deceiving as it was done on 2nd January. Most of the year didn’t see any progress other than slow progress on the weekly and minutes. The big target is to get a lot closer to 200 for daily bike KMs.

As you can see I’ve added ascent. This is going to be easy pickings for a year or two I would expect but after that the figure should be over 500m which means it won’t be a given. It will take a long time (possibly a lifetime) for the monthly ascent figure to get in anyway hard. Perhaps when I’m 80 and it’s over 500m in a month it may be a tough one. I’ll start tracking it now to provide something to aim for in my final years.

The annual figures provide some insight in to my 100 hour cap and my lack of motivation for much of the year

• Daily Bike Hours – 6 this means I didn’t manage even 7 rides of 7 hours or more.
• Weekly Bike Miles – 40 this means there were 12 weeks of less than 52 miles
• Weekly Bike Hours – 13 which show I didn’t even have 14 weeks of 14 hours.
• Weekly Bike Mins – 42 this shows 10 weeks of less than 52 minutes cycling. In practise this almost certainly shows 10 weeks of absolutely no cycling.

RUNNING

Finally daily KM hits 42 so now like daily Miles it’s stuck on Marathon distance. it will be a big day when either of them ticks up a notch.

Still weekly miles and km are stuck on 64 and 90 respectively. I’m finally feeling willing to try pushing my running a bit harder and fully expect those two to be improved this year.

Again it’s the daily figures that really give insight in to why my running is only very slowly improving.

• Daily Run Miles – 14 which means I didn’t manage 15 runs of over 15 miles. When you think that races are in this and I did five Ironman races last year it shows that I managed less than 10 runs over 15 miles. For a long course Triathlete that is just no where near enough
• Weekly Run Miles – 23 – pre foot surgery this figure was never below 31 and post it’s always been below. This is a sign of consistency. I feel a figure in the mid 30s is a given if I run consistently. This is a goal this year and overrides feelings of gunning for upping the life to date figure. The latter requires weeks of 65 miles or more whereas the former requires 35 miles week in week out.

TIME

Boy would I like to notch up life to date daily hours to 12, only need six of those suckers but at the moment the one 8 hour day I did yesterday felt like enough. Similarly the 43 hours for a week. I think perhaps I now ride consistently harder which means the long back to back days of riding required to notch up 40+ hour weeks is really tough. Or perhaps I’m just getting old and can’t hack it

[brain wave … what about a watts EdNum ?? Would have to say rides over a certain length…]

That 206 daily hours is looking attractive. Give the 90 minute early morning swims I now have available just attaching a 2hr second session those days would have that in target. Similarly I’m hoping weekly hours will be back in the high twenties rather than the very poor 19 last year. Of course with a 100 hour cap really the maximum I was doing in a week was 25 hours.

GYM

This is just for completeness. Since leaving Christchurch I’ve done absolutely zero gym work. Whether any of these move on will depend on whether I get back in the habit of gym work. Historically with me it’s been all or nothing with the gym. If I start going I’ll go three times a week and spend hours in there. If it’s not that then I do absolutely none. The reason is I’ve never noticed any improvement in performance or injury prevention which are the oft given reasons for strength work. The one thing I have noticed though is that my weight tends to be lower and easier to manage when I’m doing a lot of weights.