Goals from 2012

Happy New Year!

Time to review my goals from 2012:

1. Run at least a 3:30 at Fargo. Not quite. However! I ran a 3:34.24 for a 2 minute PR and good enough to qualify me back into Boston so I can't help but be happy about this one, anyway. I'm in process of figuring out what I want my goal at Boston to be and after that I'm done with road marathons for a little while because I'm sick of roads. Granted, I'm not saying how LONG a little while but at least a year and no reason to plan beyond that, right?

2. Stay injury free! Hmmmm. Another fail. But!! This one being a freak accident and not my fault, I actually feel as though I DID succeed with this since I didn't do anything stupid and this was mainly aimed at not getting injured by over-training or the like. I've just been klutzy this year and have two nice scars on my left leg to show it. Left leg, mind you. Same as the meniscus tear. Same as my two college injuries. Apparently my left leg hates me. Or I stepped on kryptonite that one race . . .

3. Get heat acclimated at least as well as last year/don't be afraid of the heat. Well, success, I guess. I didn't really get to test it out too much being injured for July and not running much in August but I've mostly ceased to view hot gross weather as something I can't handle.

4. See what kind of mileage my legs can handle and confidently make up my mind by June about my fall running plans and train well for whatever the plans end up to be. I did, in fact, make up my mind about the fall. Of course, this was determined for me by an injury . . . but details, details, right?

5. Log. Every. Run. Mostly success here. I know I've missed logging a few runs but less than 50 miles worth, for sure. So that makes this the first year I've had anything like a total yearly mileage. It's a lower number than I wanted but that makes it easy to improve on this year! I'm most happy with the fact that while I could only run 34 injured miles in July, I was able to bike 148.2 during the last three weeks which is pretty cool for someone who's never really biked for fitness before. I'm looking around at some other methods of logging but I think I'm going to stick with just entering it into Google Calendar. It's easy and while it doesn't add things up for me, I like it. Most importantly, it seems to be something that I can keep on top of.

Next post will be my goals for 2013! One goal I suggest for everyone? Volunteer at a race! It's loads of fun and if you run races it just makes sense to give back to the running community by working them. Races can't happen without the help of lots of people, so pick a race that maybe doesn't fit into your racing schedule or maybe it's a distance you aren't ready for yet and sign up to take care of your fellow runners. You'll probably find some inspiration for your next year along the way :) I challenge every single one of you reading this to work at least one race in 2013. No matter where you live, there's a race right down the road you can work at.

And on one last note - one of my goals for next year is to blog more regularly! Feel free to yell at me to help me keep up on that way.