2011 was quite the year for running for me. I ended up doing 16 trail running events including three 10-mile runs, four half marathons, one 25k, one 20-mile, one full marathon (finally) and one 50k ultra. Given that is all my previous years I would train for only 1-3 half marathons this was quite a shift.  By June my weekend long run was rarely shorter than 13 miles aside from tapering weeks and I ended up with 20 runs that were half marathon length or longer.  For the year I ran just over 1350 miles, which turns out to be the equivalent of a marathon a week. Of course I stared out the year with less that 20 miles per week, peaked in the fall at 40+ and ended the year with an average of 30 miles per week so I’m expecting to get in even more miles next year.

Aside from running a lot, I managed to fish quite a bit this year. Not so much travel fishing but I did manage to get in 104 days on the water, which turns out to 2 days per week. I spent most of this time in Puget Sound fishing for cutthroat and salmon, a fair bit of time in the Methow Valley region fishing trout or steelhead, and only one real trip this year which was to Andros Island for bonefish. A slightly above average year for me in fishing time and given the absolute crappy weather we had most of the year I’m amazed I got out as much as I did. Best fish of the season – the bull trout I got on the Methow while steelheading in October, it was the first bull I’d ever landed and saved that day from a skunk.

Work wise, I left Microsoft at the end of February after shutting down Microsoft Money completely; I was done after 4.5 years back in the MSN group and I wanted to devote my time to working on iOS projects.  It was a bit risky given the economy but I only went about six weeks without work.  During my last year at Microsoft I was the tech advisor for a Microsoft/Citi/MorningStar joint venture that became Bundle.com and in late April I began working in the Bundle iPhone App. In May the small team shipped v1.0 of the app, in June we shipped v1.1 of the app and from them on I took over development and shipped monthly up through v1.6 in October before starting on a bigger update in November and v2.0 released in December. I definitely enjoy working from home again with flexible hours and it has been fun knocking off small sprints of development each month and incrementally improving the app.

What’s is store for 2012?

• Running – plan is to do more long runs in 2012. Starting out the year with a 25k and plan to have a marathon and 50k done in the first half of the year. On my list so far:
  • Fat Ass 25k
  • Lord Hill 20-mile
  • Dash Point Marathon
  • Sun Mountain 50k
• Fishing – more of the same, I’ll probably spend most of my time close to home with a few road trips and probably one one saltwater travel trip.
• Work – I hope to keep working on the Bundle app into 2012 and would like to finally get one of my fly fishing related apps to the App Store.   I’m also starting to do some more web development work as I’ve been quickly learning WordPress and WP e-commerce.