At the beginning of 2016 I wrote about my focus for the year. I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year but want to take some time now to do a final review.

2016 Goal: Write 50 Blog Posts

Self Grade: 10/10

I was able to, thanks to a heroic effort in December, meet my goal of writing 50 blog posts.

Here is a chart I found interesting. Blog posts per week vs miles run per week. While I got most of my running in during the first half of the year, I did the bulk of my blog posting towards the end.

Though I hit the target number, this isn’t an ideal way to do it. Part of my reason for setting goals like this is to set a habit that I view as positive. I believed that if I focused on writing posts for a year, I would get used to the process and continue doing it for years. The best way to do that is likely to have some regularity to it, rather than a huge spike at the end to hit the total number. Because of that rush to the finish, I am somewhat burned out.

To avoid that in the future, what I might do is explore setting up cutoff points so the target is evenly dispersed and I can not make up for past misses. If I had broken last year’s goal up to one post per week – I would have hit 29 of 52. Perhaps I would give it some flexibility though by breaking it up by month of quarter – that way I would have some room to absorb busy periods or particularly difficult to write posts.

Finally, incase you missed any (or don’t believe I wrote 50) – here they all are:

1. 2016 Focus: Goal, Theme, Challenge & Exemplar
2. Experiment: Family Feedback
3. Health: Finding My Limits
4. Setting Goals – How I decided on 2:37 for My Marathon Target
5. Increasing Our Standard of Living
6. Benjamin Franklin Types of Things
7. Is Clinton Support A Gender Issue?
8. How Are You Liking Seattle?
9. COR 40L Waterproof Dry Bag Backpack
10. The Bike Counter
11. In America Today
12. Thoughts Before My Marathon Debut
13. Race Report: Jack & Jill Marathon
14. Two Steps
15. 2016 Focus: Mid Year Update
16. Product Management & Collective Action Problems
17. Passing My Athletic Peak
18. Measuring Maturity Development
19. Roots and Fruit
20. Thinking Of Our Possessions Less
21. Response: The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
22. Achieving Goals
23. How We Use Time: Consuming, Processing & Producing
24. Parenting Is An Exercise In Discovering Gratitude
25. How We Use Time: Investing, Enjoying and Giving
26. Should We Work?
27. Run a Sub 2:37 Marathon – Training Plan
28. The Chief Bottle Washer
29. Running a “Marathon”
30. Planning A Goal
31. S.T.O.K.E.D. – Six Minimalism Tips
32. To The New York City Marathon
33. What Makes A Great Rivalry?
34. How Could This Happen?
35. Water
36. How The Kroleski Family Does Toys – Our Rotation Process
37. Getting Rid of A Collection
38. Vaccines
39. Measuring My Health
40. Adding Efficiency Through Business, Government and People
41. Team Loyalty In Sports
42. Problems and Profits
43. Yearly Focus – v1.4 Release Notes
44. Chapters
45. Today We Worship Our God(s)
46. Steps I’m Taking To Get Sick Less
47. Three Day Per Week Marathon Training Plan
48. Race Report: New York City Marathon 2016
49. The Day I Didn’t Run
50. 2016 Focus: End of Year Review

2016 Theme: Health

Self Grade: 6/10

I wrote three blog posts about health this year – one about why it was important to me, one about how I quantified it and one about steps I was taking to improve an aspect of it. All of those are the culmination of a good bit of thinking on the topic.

I would have scored myself higher had I read more on the topic from external authors. I was really synthesizing more than pulling in new information and I think I should be doing more than that for my yearly theme.

 2016 Challenge: Run a Sub 2:37 Marathon

Self Grade: Failure OR 9/10

My fastest marathon this year was 2:42:23, which was ~5.5 minutes short of my goal. So using a binary scale I would have to mark this a failure.

I’m ecstatic with the results of this year though. The reason I do these yearly focus challenges is to get myself to focus on something. I believe that by doing less, I can do those things better and achieve results that are exponentially greater than the sum of what I could achieve by splitting my focus.

In terms of setting focus, this was a monumental success.

At the beginning of the year I had never raced a marathon and it had been close to a decade since I was in good running shape – since I would have called myself a runner. I wasn’t completely sure I could get into this kind of shape again – that I could train like this – that I could avoid injury.

I am proud to call myself a runner again. I succeeded in focusing on it this year. I ran three marathons total, Jack & Jill, Big Sur & New York City – finishing in 1st place, 37th place (top 1.5%) and in the top 4% respectively. I ran a 4th of July 10k in my wife’s home town and won that as well. I also locked up KOMs (the fastest time) on a couple of Strava segments in my area. In total I ran 1,627 miles – straight through the midsoles of five pairs of shoes.

Here is a picture of all the shoes I wore through the year and the medals I got. Funny that the medal for winning Jack & Jill is smaller than the participant medal. The 4th of July race didn’t have a participant medal, only one for winning my age group.

I also had one of my most exciting running incidents when during a late night run I was attacked by an owl. I was actually on the local news as: ‘Greg Kroleski Attacked by Owl While Jogging’. Success.

All of this and I would still call my time commitment ‘manageable’. I ran or cross trained on 183 days total, exactly 50% of 365. Across those days I spent a total of 214 hours running. When you add in time for getting dressed, showering, stretching, etc. I would say my average amount of time invested per day was ~1 hour. That seems like the high end of the reasonable range for a yearly challenge.

All in all, this was a model year for me in terms of setting focus without overdoing it. I am going to be doing some thinking about how I can repeat this in future years.

2016 Exemplar: Benjamin Franklin

Self Grade: 4/10

The original intent of the exemplar category was to learn more about what made that person tick and then implement a few of their practices. My focus was really split across the items this year and so this was the item that got the least attention.

I am about 100 pages away from finishing the lengthy Walter Isaacson biography and feel that I have a pretty good sense for who Ben was. The thing I did not get to do much of was implement his practices. If I had more time, that is where I would have spent it.