2020

So, 2020. What a year to try and take stock of. The headline number is 551 activities and just over 24,600 minutes of moving about, which sounds impressive until you remember that for a significant chunk of the year there was genuinely nowhere else to go. Running was the backbone of it all — 123 runs covering 1,231 km at an average of 5:24 per kilometre, which I'm quietly pleased with — and I somehow accumulated 560 achievements and 237 PRs along the way, though I suspect Strava's definition of a PR got considerably more generous when races disappeared and the competition shrank to just me and my street. The 221 walks (over 1,050 km, since apparently I also became a person who logs walks) and 133 Joe Wicks workouts tell their own story about what life looked like for a while there, and I won't pretend the yoga five times wasn't entirely driven by desperation rather than any newfound spiritual curiosity.

Comparing back to 2019, the difference is fairly stark in places. Total activities more than doubled — 551 versus 269 — and active minutes went from around 7,240 to over 24,600, which sounds like a triumph of dedication but is probably more a triumph of having nowhere to be. Cycling dropped off a cliff, down from 74 rides to just 26, and swimming more or less halved, which is what happens when pools close and Zwift only gets you so far (the FTP test suggesting rather more so). What 2019 had that 2020 didn't was a race — a real one, with other people and a finish line and everything — so that feels like the obvious thing to go and find again, rather than quietly banking PRs on empty roads.

Summary generated by Claude