This kind of post belongs here every January. Without further ado…
What’s new
Front crawl leads, but not enormously
Continuing 2019 trend, front crawl style was the most preferred. A typical 2020 training in numbers looks like this:
- front crawl – 31.52 lengths (71%)
- breaststroke – 8.75 lengths (20%)
- backstroke – 4.08 lengths (9%)
To be honest, before I’ve checked the exact data I’d been certain the predominance of front crawl was higher. But this is why you gather data, right? To confront your opinions with facts.
Forced breaks
For obvious reasons, swimming pools were closed or hard to get into sometimes in 2020. Because of that, I had to take two longer breaks:
- Mid March – mid June
- Mid December – ? (ongoing)
Swim like there’s no tomorrow
It turned out that the polish government likes to close facilities without notice. Therefore after June I swam keeping in mind that it could be my last time this week, month, or year. This is kind of fascinating how every training tastes differently under such circumstances.
By the way, stoics should relate:
If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life (…) you see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.
Yeah, swim is cool, but do you even lift, bro?
Just a quick reminder that I still love going to gym and that takes precedence over swimming. Ideally I’d do both, but I had to choose, I choose gym every time.
Stats
Here’s my attendance & total distance by month in 2020. To keep it comparable to 2019, I excluded training with fewer than 20 lengths.
| Month 2020 | Attendance | Att. delta | Total m | m delta |
| 1 | 9 | -4 | 9300 | -8000 |
| 2 | 9 | +2 | 9750 | +1500 |
| 3 | 4 | -4 | 3525 | -5450 |
| 4 | 0 | -11 | 0 | -12250 |
| 5 | 0 | -3 | 0 | -2500 |
| 6 | 6 | -1 | 5525 | -275 |
| 7 | 10 | -2 | 11950 | +1450 |
| 8 | 7 | +2 | 7800 | +2800 |
| 9 | 8 | +2 | 10150 | +5400 |
| 10 | 8 | +8 | 8900 | +8900 |
| 11 | 7 | -1 | 8800 | -2950 |
| 12 | 5 | -5 | 5725 | -2325 |
Obviously, the month-by-month comparison make limited sense in such a crazy year.
By quarter:
| Q | Attendance | Att. delta | Total m | m delta |
| 1 | 22 | -6 | 22275 | -12250 |
| 2 | 6 | -15 | 5525 | -15025 |
| 3 | 25 | +4 | 29900 | +9650 |
| 4 | 20 | +2 | 23425 | +9525 |
Worse first half of the year, but kept up in the second half. Understandable.
Total km by year:
- 2020: 81125
- 2019: 89225
- 2018: 81900 (extrapolated)
A little regress here, but still impressive, taking 3 months break into consideration.
Previous posts
8 reasons why I love swimming (early 2018)
Swim on! and see you in the 2021 review!
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