2008 has come and gone, and 2009 has started.

I was on vacation at the New Year this year, so my look back over the past year was delayed by a week or so.

In 2008 I ran 390 times for 2612.9 miles in about 14 days, 22 hours and 7 minutes of running. That’s an almost 38% increase in the number of miles that I ran in 2007, and a bit more than the 2300-2500 miles that I had predicted. I also averaged about 40 seconds per mile slower than I averaged in 2007, which I think has had a lot to do with my success and my relative lack of injuries. I have almost doubled my annual mileage since 2006.

I ran 2 marathons last year, both of them in new states. First, after taking a course to get my coaching certification, I treated ING Georgia as a training run and ran in with at tempo pace at a bit over 3 hours. I followed that up 5 weeks later with the Cox Sports Marathon in Rhode Island. I not only ran a personal best 2:43:27, but I also won the race by a minute and 10 seconds and set the course record.

My goal for the rest of the year was concentrated on running a fast 5k, but I never got my training exactly where I wanted it to be despite training through a very speedy 34:08.1 Beach to Beacon 10k.

My training got back on track after the 5k season ended, though, as I got ready for an ultramarathon just after the new year. My mileage was pretty steadily in the mid-60s, peaking at just over 100 miles before Thanksgiving. I also did something new in my training, which was to run 3 runs of at least 20 miles within a 5 day span of time.

My weight has pretty much stayed the same as it has for the past few years:

It rarely varies by more than a pound or two, and over the year stayed within a 7 pound total range.

This past year I wrote fewer articles here at Run to Win despite writing quite a bit more in total. I wrote 334 articles, almost 300 fewer than in 2007. However, I added an email newsletter at the end of 2007 to which I wrote quite a few articles, as well as quite a few special reports and ebooks that are available for purchase or download. I began getting more into video and audio than I have been in the past, and I expect to improve my skills in that area in 2009.

In the past year, my most popular article was one from May of 2007, What is a Tempo Run? My next most popular article is a perennial favorite, 9 Things To Do The Week Before A Marathon (My first book is an expansion on that article that gets into all of the nitty gritty details about how to not only prepare for your marathon but also how to run and recover from it!)

What has been your favorite content here at Run to Win from the past year? How has your health and training gone in 2008? What sort of goals do you have for 2009? Shoot me an email or leave a comment below; I’d love to hear about it.