I’ve never been one for resolutions so much as setting goals. Are they different from each other? Eh, maybe! Maybe not. Resolutions never seem to have “success criteria” like goals do and if you can’t measure success, what’s the point? So here’s a few goals I have for this year.
Sports
Last year was my most balanced year of triathlon training ever. I was able to really increase my swim volume without negatively impacting my run & bike volume. With that said, I think there’s room to improve on bike & run volume just a bit. As long as I’m getting the quality work in, it doesn’t really matter but I enjoy these sports so I like making sure I do enough of them!
This gives me about as much swimming as last year which would be hard to improve on while getting a little more cycling & running in.
Of course, this needs to translate to race results and I have a few goal races this year that I’d like to see some real improvements in. I’d like to break the 23 minute mark on my 5k and the 6 hour mark at the 70.3 distance. I think both of these are doable.
Health
For years I kept my weight in the upper 160s to mid 170s and I was always happy with that. About 18 months ago, for some reason, I let go of that a bit and my weight crept up into the mid 180s. After some half-hearted attempts to shed that weight, I decided in October to do it the right way and really have been counting calories religiously. Now I’m back to the mid-160s. My goal for the year is to keep it there.
Sleep is also really important and I’ve been doing better on this past year. My goal for this year is to average over 7 hours of sleep every week. I’m usually there but I do miss sometimes. Along with that, being asleep by 10:30 would be the ideal time to get that in.
Writing
There’s a lot of different things here. I’ll start with the blog because that’s easy. I’m going to make a goal of updating the blog once a week. It’ll usually be sports related but there’s other things too I can always put in here.
Then there’s my novel I’ve been working on. I’m going to give myself 6 months (June 1) to get to the end of the first round of revisions. That won’t mean its done but I want a version I feel good about. Its already further than anything else I’ve written so I want to keep it going!
Music
Last year was the first one in a few years where I didn’t play my clarinet much. I am going to try and do that twice a week going forward.