March Training in Review: MONSTER Month!

I had no plans to make March big. But with my family gone for a week and a nice long birthday ride, March's numbers just kept growing. Here's what my training log looked like:

The first 9 days are pretty normal.

Then I had a big week (highlighted in this post) that had a nice long birthday ride and an extra trip to the pool. And notice all the short "commuter" bike miles through the middle and end of the month - lots of random riding! And over 100 outdoor miles in 1 week... IN MARCH!

I also had a little extra time last month, so I ended up doing a lot of big upper body weeks. I noted that once in this post, but have since had a few big weeks as well. So my strength numbers were big too!

All in all, here's what my training numbers looked like for March:

• SWIM: 14,825 yards (only ONE month has been bigger since Covid started!)
• BIKE: 217.50 miles (only 8 months with more miles since Covid... and this was MARCH!)
• BIKE TRAINER: 11 hrs and 33 mins
• RUN: 109.72 miles (tied for biggest month since Covid)
• STRENGTH: 60 hrs and 33 mins (a MASSIVE lifetime monthly PR)

My trainer time is just OK. But everything else is HUGE. (Add in that trainer time at 19 mph and "total bike miles" for the month is 436.95 miles!)

Regarding my strength time, I noted in a post about last May's training that 54 hours was a huge PR month for me, and here I was over 60 hours. Nice.

I got in 3 running speed workouts over these 4 weeks as well (and the last day of February had a speed workout as well, so that's 4 speed workouts over 5 weeks).

A monthly PR for steps with 633,838 (20,446/day on average).


March also had a swim distance PR
(since swimming with a Garmin) when my family was gone.

I've been slowly upping my distance and swimming farther and farther. Recent workouts have been 2800-3100 yards. That 3300 was the longest in a LONG time. I looked back in my training log: pre-Covid, I was swimming 2-3x / week (so overall yardage was way up), but most of those swims were 1800-2200 yards. I started seeing longer swims of 2400-2500 yards occasionally in early 2015 (10 years ago!), but only over the course of a few months before they dropped back down to the 1200-2000 yard range. April 2011 (PRE-KIDS!!) had a 3100 yard swim. I had to look back to Feb of 2011 to find a 1 hour "postal swim" where I covered 3500 yards as the most recent swim that was farther than the 3300 yards I did last month. And because that was a "straight through" swim, it was only 61 mins long, so still shorter (time-wise) than my swim last month - I have to go back to training with Coach Jen before the 2010 TC 10 Mile where my goal was to break 60 mins to find a swim longer than 67 minutes (I found a 70 min swim covering 3600 yards in Sept of 2010).

Longest swim PR, but also note that March 2025 also had my fastest
100 yards (seen farther down in this post) because I don't often do 100s.

(My "meters" PRs aren't special because I hardly ever swim in a 50 meter pool. Normally just a 25 yard pool. It's been maybe a year since I've been in "the big pool!")

The last 2 years started with more RACES, and then they ended up being good years. I haven't raced in a long time, but my training is good. Guess we'll see what happens in my first upcoming races shortly!!