While It's Still January...

(Just FYI, it is still New Year's Month (ie, January), so writing this post is TOTALLY not weird or late. My blog, my rules.)

I really do get unreasonably excited about the start of a new year. I don't think it's really about the dates or the fact that the numbers change; it's probably more because the end of the year tends to be so insane with holidays and parties and traveling, and Jan. 1 kind of marks the end to all the crazy & a return to more or less normal life.

It's tempting in the middle of all the insanity to start straining forward toward a clean slate and thinking about all the exciting things I want to do with it, but more often than not that ends up derailing me from stuff I need to do now, in the throes of the crazy, so I try to at least wait until post-Christmas to get too deeply into any of that.

I have also learned that it's really, really (REALLY) easy to over-commit myself (shocking).

I'm sure this never happens to any of you.

I think in 2012 I made the mistake of getting too complicated with my goals, so this year I want to keep them simple. A few categories, with one "reasonable" and one "stretch" goal for each.

1) 5K. Run another sub-21 5K / Run a sub-20:30.

2) 10K. PR (sub-44:21) / Sub-44:00.

3) Marathon. Sub-3:45 / BQ (sub-3:35).

4) Mileage. 1500 miles / 2000 miles.

These are the big goals -- the end results that I actually care about. There are some supporting goals that I think are probably necessary in order to meet the big ones. Mainly they involve the following nebulous stuff:

1) Eat better

2) Do strength work

3) Work on flexibility

(Sound familiar?)

It took me a few weeks to figure out the specific details of how I was going to approach these things (you might recall that the lack of specificity was part of my downfall in 2012 with these very same items), but I think I've got it figured out now:

1) Eat better
• Salad every work day
• Default to plant-based meals
• Pack in the (mostly lean) protein
• Plan the week's meals ahead of time & make a grocery trip for necessary ingredients at the beginning of the week (or whenever is possible / makes the most sense)

2) Do strength work

• Pilates or yoga twice a week
• Lunch time strength work twice a week

3) Work on flexibility

• Yoga at least once a week
• Purposeful stretching (say, 15-20 minutes) at least one other day per week (Ideally I'd be hitting two yoga classes, but I can only reliably get to one, so this is sort of compensating for that)

We'll see how these work out over time. I'm about two weeks into trying to follow them, and happy to report that so far they feel like reasonable steps that aren't too onerous to stick to.

I'll get back to you in a month or so with how it's going....