Setting goals is crucial for envisioning and achieving ambitious athletic feats (nothing new here!).
Show me someone who doesn’t set goals for themselves, and I will show you an underachiever (and likely someone who wavers between motivation and demotivation regularly).
This may sound harsh, but I speak as someone who has had many instances in my life where I was "loosey-goosey" about my actions and existed in a plane where I never really got what I wanted of the efforts I put in.
This happens, and not everything we do has to have a specific goal, but if you’re training to be the best runner you can be, you're better off setting a goal and standard for yourself that you can hold yourself accountable to.
Now that this is out of the way, I will also say that runners often don’t have an issue creating ambitious goals. We want to run a sub-20 5k, a sub-4-hour marathon, or maybe it’s to run 40 miles a week. Whatever the goal may be, runners usually have a number in mind.
I want to add a spin to the thought process.
Runners often create goals with a short-term mindset, meaning they have an idea of what they want to run for this week, next month, or the outcome of a 16-week marathon training cycle.
There’s nothing wrong with this!
However, these short-term goals are harder to reach than we think.
Real progress takes time, and we often overestimate what we can do in the short term. The flip side is that we underestimate what we can do long term.
I preach consistency, and I’m not ashamed of it!
In my early years of college, I created a 4-year plan for myself. I set out time and mileage goals and the specific things I thought that I would need to do over those 4 years to reach those benchmarks.
I put my focus on the present moment, of course, but I followed my long-term vision as best I could. I experienced many bad workouts and races, but I never let them get ahold of me for too long because I knew that I was working toward something bigger.
If I stayed the course, I knew that I would eventually get there.
And I did.
Every goal I set out for myself, I achieved. I may have thought it and brought it into existence, but either way, my 4-year plan was successful.
I see too many runners who have goals within 6 months but no goals beyond that. No long-term vision to work toward, nothing beyond what lies right ahead. Each race or conclusion to that period is a hard stop.
If you’re one of these athletes, I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong, but I’m here to encourage you to create bigger goals, goals that you could achieve in 2 or 5 years, versus 3-6 months. In doing so, you will always see your current training and racing as a step towards that big goal, as progress.
So, if you’d like to go through this exercise, grab a piece of paper and a pen or pull up a document on your computer and write out your long-term goals. Be sure to include the specifics behind what you believe it’s going to take to get there and any changes that you think you will have to make to allow it to happen. Keep this handy and use this as a reference as you make your way through your micro/macrocycles of training and frequently ask yourself, “Is what I am doing now helping me get to where I want to be?”
This is the start.
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