2020 Review
⚠️ This article is meant mainly for future me. It’s not meant to be a brag-fest, rather a summary I can come back to later.
2020, my oh my, what a year.
Since the history of 2020 most likely won’t perish in time I won’t go into much detail here. Let’s just say that post-corona adjustments were quite significant. More about that later…
Since the start of the year in chronological order:
- With more time on my hands than ever I went all-in on sports.
Detailed stats are below but to summarise it I:
- ran more than ever and broke my personal bests with 5k at 19:51, 10k at 39:47, half-marathon at 1:27:36, and marathon at 3:25:15 (I burned through 3 pairs of running shoes 💸).
- cycled more than ever, did my first 200km ride, and bought a road bike 💸.
- completed half-Ironman in 5:24:56 (1.9k swim at 43:43, 90k bike ride at 2:52:00 and 21.1k run at 1:41:30).1
- there’s probably more but I already forgot.
- I didn’t have any diving holidays 😔.
- I spent a lot of time with friends, I feel like that’s somethings I neglected lately.
And in no-particular order:
- first time skitouring, the gear cost me a fortune but the powder rides are worth it.
- started this website.
- finished a bunch of books after a one-year reading break.
- tracked my finances for the whole year.
- tracked my food for 3 months.
- went semi-vegan. Now I eat mostly plant-based food but still have a meat or animal product from time to time. I love how easy the diet is to digest; I can have lunch at 13:00 and go for a run at 14:00 and my stomach won’t turn upside down.
- did my first pull-up (also 3 in a row). It’s all about the technique.
- cooked almost every day for myself and my siblings and learned a bunch of new recipes and cooking tricks.
I also did a great clean up in my life. I deleted facebook and never looked back. The only thing that I miss are the various small marketplace groups and notifications about events. I gave away or sold a lot of things, clothing, gifts I came by over the years that never left their packaging, and old electronics that were just lying around unused. The minimalistic approach to life brings peace to the soul. I got rid of all my non-plain t-shirts and trousers and would like to bring it further this year and maybe even get to one or two colors only. The less decisions one has to make the better.
Bread was the signature food of 2020. I couldn’t be more mainstream than baking sourdough bread during the lock down. I kept baking though and still enjoy it. It still ceases to amaze me how different results can one get depending on the process and ratios of water and flour. And I am far from good at baking bread. I think I didn’t get consistent results even once and I still have no idea why things go wrong when they go wrong which I think is pretty important skill to have to get better.
Stats
I started collecting statistics about a lot of things I do. Mostly finances and sports, but for a few months I also logged every meal I ate. I do that mostly for two reasons. Firstly, I can improve. Be it the way I handle finances or the way I train. Secondly, I enjoy it. So without further ado here’s a brief summary of statistics I was able to collect over the course of 2020.
Sports
This year (since the end of April when I bought my Garmins and started tracking everything on Strava) I did 141 runs, totaling 1628 km in 127.5 hours. Probably more than in all other years together. The same applies for cycling as well where I finished with 66 rides for total of 3604 km and 55097 m elevation gain in 169 hours. My swimming performance was poor, partly due to the corona restrictions (swimming pools were closed) and partly because I still don’t like swimming as much as cycling or running. I did 20 swims with total distance around 30km (the figures are estimates because I used swimming tracking to track the cold bathing sessions). In the end, I squeezed 350 activities into approximately 250 days; for total of 435 hours and 139401 kCal (maybe the only reason I am not overweight yet).
Overall, I consider all of that quite an achievement. I was more active than in all my university years combined. I mostly attribute that to not being in a relationship after 5 years, i.e. no restrictions on what I spend my time on. Other factor is, that being active makes me happy and I feel guilty if I don’t do at least some activity in a day.
I hope to keep the pace even the next year and would love to pump those numbers up a little bit more. The goal is to run 1875km (5km a day), ride 3650 km (10km a day) and swim 365km (1km a day). Those targets are quite low because I don’t want to stress myself and I will go for more either way. I would also love to run the sub-3 marathon and finish a full Ironman race.
Inspired by https://marcusvolz.com/strava/.
Finances
2020 was year of great sporting expenses. 48% of my expenses went to sporting and sporting goods. Of that, cycling accounts for 1/3 (mostly because I bought new road bike), 1/4 went into ski touring gear and 1/6 into shooting (license and gun). I hope the new equipment will last for at least a little bit and the sport with consume much less of my income next year.
Vacation expenses were super low because of corona, 13.379 Kč in total. While I don’t have numbers from previous years I assume this is around 25% compared to what it was. I also spent 18.810 Kč on coffee 😱, out of that 8.500 Kč at Káva s Párou, basically my co-working space since August. I managed to put aside 130.000 Kč, not great, not terrible. It’s a lot more than the previous years but far less in the income percentage than I wold like. This is definitely the biggest goal for next year - safe more.
2020
Overall, 2020 was a great year. I was active. I had fun. And most importantly, I was happy. Doing so many sports and activities brings a lot of joy and variety into what would otherwise be very monotonic life and I want to keep that up. Sometimes it gets lonely but there are always friend and family to step in and after all, no relationship is better than relationship that doesn’t fit anyones needs. If even this year was great after all I can’t wait to see what’s coming up.