2012 exercise recap

Here are some statistics from 2012 in respect to exercise:

• Total exercise hours logged during 2012 amounted to roughly 301 hours, or roughly 49 minutes per day or 5 hours and 47 minutes per week.
• During the year I logged in 35 sick days. The granularity in respect to reasons is a bit lacking, but a gut feeling is that roughly half of those days were related to flu/cold and the rest were miscellaneous (e.g. small injuries). The sick days were relatively evenly spread out over the course of the year into 7 sick day stretches, averaging roughly 5 days per "sickness".
• The top three categories of sports were: 1) Savate (108h), 2) gym (98h), and 3) running (38h).
• Over the year I ran 384 km for an average pace of roughly 10.1 km/h and improved my half-marathon PR to 1h52min12s.
• During the summer I started to get into strength training and implemented Rippetoe's Starting Strength routine for beginners rather strictly for about two months, after which I made some adjustments to take account for some considerations from practicing Savate (e.g. a laxer emphasis on pushing up weight to allow for more recovery time, introduction of calf-work, etc.).
• Weight-wise my body mass increased by about 8.5kg from January to December due to conscious calorie intake increase and strength training.

Looking back on 2012, my only "official" target was to try to average 2 hours of exercise per week. This goal was achieved before midsummer. Overall I'm quite satisfied with how the year turned out in this respect and going into 2013, I'll continue along a roughly similar track, with the main new thing being that I'll try to cut fat during the Spring to drop my weight for the running season.

In terms of target setting, I don't think I'll define any strict targets for 2013. Time-wise the unofficial de facto target for 2012 turned into putting in 300+ hours by the end of the year. The temporal measurement is in my experience good if you are faced with a problem of not being able to motivate yourself to get to do any exercise. However, once you actually start doing stuff, the target becomes relatively irrelevant and needs to evolve into something else. Technically for 2013 I should be more focused on setting e.g. targets for running times, for weightlifting weights, etc., but as I'm not doing any of this too seriously, I'm afraid that defining hard goals like that would ultimately act as a demotivator. As such, I guess the goal then for 2013 would be to improve everything else but the overall time spent.