January fatigue.

Greetings from the increasingly desperation-filled land of paper-writing! I have a whole lot due in two days, which has left little time for blogging. It has not, however, cut into my gym time, which I realized when I looked at my January calendar.

As I've mentioned before, I don't keep a lot of statistics about my workouts. I keep a database with basic info from my races, I track my mileage using a combo of Nike+ and DailyMile (which generates the little mileage ticker you see to the right), and I write some notes on my wall calendar every day. Very basic notes: just a checkmark indicating that I exercised, and then something like "run, 6mi, 1:15," or "swimming, 30 mins." I add up the checkmarks every month and it usually ends up showing that I exercised about 5 times per week.

Not this month, though! This month, there are 26 checkmarks for 31 days, and many of those days include two different workouts. Weights in the morning, run in the evening; run in the morning, yoga in the evening- you get the idea. This is more exercise than I did at the height of marathon training. There are two reasons for this: First, I'm in the middle of Striders' half-marathon training 2011 and I'm trying to be more diligent about doing weekday runs in order to improve over last year's time. Second, I added the yoga and the swimming this month without subtracting anything.

I think this is a taste of what serious tri-training will be like, and it is both fun and exhausting. Adding the new activities has really boosted my motivation this month- maybe too much. Last night, I got home around 6, ate dinner, and then sat down to rest for a few minutes before heading to the gym for my weekly "Bachelor" viewing on the treadmill. Somewhere around 6:30pm, I fell asleep. At 8am, I woke up. That's right- I slept for 13 1/2 hours!  Perhaps a sign that I should take it a little easier in February...