I did not stay up until midnight last night. In fact, I barely made it past 8 pm and that’s already pretty late for me. (I get up in the 3 am range most days and I love me my sleep, so I’m usually headed for bed when other people are still eating dinner. Ha!)
It occurred to me this morning, while scrolling through everybody else’s NYE posts on Instagram that I don’t place a lot of importance on how I finish the old year. I didn’t count up miles logged or races run or pounds lost or what have you, but damn I am looking forward to the miles I’m gonna log in 2014 and races I’m going to run and the pounds I plan on helping my clients lose! If you’re interested, here are my goals for the coming year in no particular order:
- Actually log miles run. To be honest, I wanted to add up my 2013 mileage, but good ol’ Windows 8.1 pretty much wiped my computer clean when it updated in October. For the life of me, I can’t imagine the person who thought it would be a good idea to fuck up all my programs and call it an “upgrade,” but there you go. My old Garmin files are still on the hard drive, but I can’t figure out how to open them and add up all the miles. So this year, I’m going to set up an Excel spreadsheet and log them manually. Not quite the “old fashioned” way of pencil and paper, but not exactly as convenient as clicking the “My Activities” folder and looking at the total.
- Finish what I start. 2013 was apparently the year of the DNF for me – two of them! WTF? So that won’t happen in 2014.
- Run more ultras. I have three on the calendar already: a 50K in February, a 50-miler in April and a 100K in May. I’m so flipping excited about these races, you have no idea! After this year’s awful CIM (about which I did not blog, but see the above bullet point for how it went. Boooo!), I realized that my heart really isn’t in road racing anymore. I just don’t have the stomach – literally – for the hype and nerves that go along with big races, so I’m going to stick with my low-key trail races and just enjoy running this year without trying to beat a clock.
- Get stronger – specifically, learn to do a pull-up, work on inversions and add weight to my squats. I just finished an eye-opening 30 day challenge on IG where I got inverted every day in the month of December. Generally speaking, I don’t participate in those month-long challenges because I can already hold a plank for more than a minute and do 100 push-ups and 100 squats. But holy moly, getting into a handstand or a headstand every day?? Scary!! And yet awesome at the same time. So I’m issuing my own challenge to myself this year, starting with the pull-up one. I’m guessing it’s going to take me more than a month to be able to get my chin over the bar unassisted. We’ll see. As a little corollary goal, I intend to post about my progress here and on IG regularly.
- The usual – drink more water, be nicer, etc. Do I even need to write these down? I’m pretty sure those have been on my goal list since 1998.
Happy New Year to us all!! What are your goals this year??
ajh says
Good luck with your goals. You’ll do them I’m sure.
I LOVE adding up my miles. One of my favorite things about exercising are all the stats.
Can’t wait to follow the ultra journeys.
Kate Geisen says
I’m currently thinking on my new goals. Guess maybe the time for that was the end of last year, but I’ve been way too busy having fun. 🙂
Those ultras sound exciting! After my last (non-ultra) race, I have even more respect for the distances you’ll be running.