By the Numbers: 2013 summary

Let’s take a look at how I did compared to what I wanted to accomplish in the areas of reading, writing, and swimming in 2013…

Books

I have an annual goal of reading at least 36 books (or about 3 books a month, on average).

This year (so far) I’ve read a total of 39 books! Most were fiction. Only 6 of the 39 were non-ficiton. But only 10 of the 33 fiction books could be considered “young adult” fiction.

If you’re interested, I wrote reviews for each of them on Goodreads — you can find links to my reviews by checking out the Reading page on this blog.

Writing

This year I wanted to “create” as well as “consume” content. To that end:

I wrote 60 blog posts (on average that’s more than one post per week).
I added about 15k words to a novel I started back in 2009.
I “won” NaNoWriMo 2013 by writing a first draft of a novel that is currently just over 51k words.
I wrote countless short stories, essays, exercises, and even a few poems, for my UC Berkeley Extension classes.
I completed four UC Berkeley Extension classes (9 credits).

I’d call that a success. 🙂

Swimming

I started off this year hoping to compete in my first US Masters Swimming races and swim about 250 miles, total, for the year (about one mile 5x per week on average, with 2 weeks off for vacation). I had some swimming goal times for breaststroke, and I wanted to at least swim US Masters Nationals Qualifying times in the three breaststroke events. To that end:

I swam approximately 47,500 yrds (~353 miles) this year on a total of 200 days (just over 1.75 miles /day). That pencils out to more miles, over fewer days than I’d planned.
My best SCY yards times for breaststroke were: 2:51.81 in the 200, 1:20.59 in the 100, and 38.16 in the 50 (these beat my original goal times for the year of 2:58.03, 1:23.32, and 38.22, respectively).
I finished #20 in the Nation for the 35-39 age group in 200 yard breaststroke!
I created a Swimming page on my blog and posted a few sample workouts and some info for “unattached” US Masters swimmers.

Not bad for my first year back in competitive swimming, and with training just over 50% of the days in 2013… Can’t wait to see what I can do next year!

Other Cool Stuff

In case you aren’t following me on Twitter, here is my “Year on Twitter” according to Vizify: