the5krunner.com – A Brief Year In Review

In some respects I was dreading 2023. Mostly linked to the fallout to the bike industry from Covid and generally recessionary factors affecting my non-US traffic.

As it turned out I’ve had my best year for website traffic albeit only with single-digit growth. I’m not entirely sure why. Sure I wrote more posts and focussed less on smart watches and more on sports watches but the real reasons perhaps lie elsewhere. There is more traffic coming from the UK and my best post was bizarrely ECG-related ie This one.

Less surprising was my best-performing review which was for the Forerunner 965 and the best-performing general news story was the death of two athletes at Ironman Ireland. Hopefully, that last, tragic event will spur all organisers to be super-mindful about our safety as we compete in their events.

2 triathletes die – Ironman Ireland 70.3

My best ‘old’ post was ‘about the5krunner‘ which for some inexplicable reason generated lots of interest in August, September and October. Maybe it was Ironman’s lawyers figuring out if they should try to gag me writing about the Cork event (August).

Money

I definitely made less money than last year, despite a similar amount of hours spent typing, running and cycling. What I did make from advertising was hit badly this year. Partly because I turn off all ads for reviews (as they might result in affiliate revenues) but more because of a cutback in ad spend by the brands. I also tidied up who can and can’t advertise, which means I turned off certain industry players’ ads as well as most of those from Amazon and those are the companies that most want to advertise here! So instead you’ll get ads that reflect the subjects of your recent searches and visits to other sites.

One upside was from those who kindly chose to support the work here. Again, a big thank you to you all. I was able to eat this year.

My Sports

I lost my swimming mojo this year. So if anyone finds it please email me and I’ll pop you a return address.

That meant a rekindling of my love for running, cycling and duathlon. I seem to have gone back 10 years in time to improve my parkrun (5k) times, cycle lots and far, and to see how I fared at some duathlon qualifiers. I’m testing how good I might be at duathlon when I go up an age group in 2025 as I still want to win a medal from an Age Group event that I consider meaningful. I got back up to an 80% Age Graded 5k parkrun time, so was pleased to do that as it’s quite hard. At least it is for me.

I’ve also been very good at taking waking HRV readings with Marco’s HRV4Training app (plus Polar H10). Invariably it told me that my once-a-month splurge drinking alcohol wasn’t good for me and that my HRV was genetically low for some weird reason. It also usually told me I was ready to train…meaning I probably hadn’t tried hard enough on some of the previous days. Again, all that HRV stuff is what I used to do (over) 10 years ago.

My Tech Running This Site

The Year Ahead

I’m looking forward to a similar year in 2024 to this one. There will be some nice tech. I’ll do the same sorts of training and get back in the lake.

The site will still not quite work as I want it to and we will have lots of relatively predictable tech to look forward to.

2023 Gadget Excitement – What I look forward to In 2024

Finally, this was my favourite post of the year. I think it’s funny but I’m probably the only one!

Parody: Garmin Fenix, Forerunner and Edge Messages – What they really mean