New Year’s resolutions are an interesting idea. On the surface they might seem like a cure all pill. You just set a goal to workout 8 days a week and, even though you never went to the gym last year, suddenly you will turn your life around. Extreme (and impossible) example maybe, but they can get out of hand very easily and because of that they have become a modern day trope in many ways.

That being said, I do think when set appropriately they are a good way to motivate yourself to make smaller changes in your life and focus on things you want to spend your time and effort on. Therefore, despite my misgivings above I have some resolutions to make below.

Exercise

I might have made a joke about exercise in the example above, but I do believe that exercise is important and have some more attainable goals than 8 days of exercise a week.

Running

I have always been on and off with running and never took it very seriously until I ran a half marathon in October of 2015. I remember training for that by going on long runs multiple days a week and it was awesome. I haven’t done a race longer than a 5K since, and therefore haven’t felt the urge to run like that again. While running another half marathon or even farther is a long term goal, for this year I want to try to run 500 miles. This seems like a lofty goal considering my biggest year on Strava so far was 2015 with 291.1 miles,¹ but most of those miles were short treadmill runs. I hadn’t explored the idea of running distances until late in that year.

With most of January gone I am at 27.5 miles and have about a week left to get the rest of the 14.17 miles. I think that’s pretty good for the coldest month of the year. Still this past week I’ve been slacking/sick and hopefully posting this will get me back out there.

Lifting

The other side of my exercise goal is to go to the gym and lift. While running is good exercise I also play ultimate frisbee. To get better at my explosiveness and have more strength in general I need to be in the gym not just going on long runs. An added benefit of going to the gym is that it will help keep me from getting injured in both running and ultimate. So to keep this goal I want to go to the gym and lift 100 times this year. This means picking up some slack from this month though because I’ve only been 4 times out of 8.3 average I need.

Between these two goals I think I will have my work cut out for me.

Personal Projects

Another area I want to focus on is in my personal projects. This has always been a struggle for me. When I get done with my day to day work finding the motivation to work on a side project or task can be hard. Setting goals for this can help me narrow my focus and accomplish a little at a time.

Blog Posts

That’s right this post is part of a resolution. I haven’t posted on here since 2016 and I think that shows how stagnant I have been in my projects. So while this isn’t a goal to complete n projects in a year, it can function as that because if I don’t at least work on the projects then I will have nothing to post about. My goal is to write 2 posts a month. Seems pretty easy except for the fact that there is 1 week left in January and this is my first post, so keep a lookout for the next one!

Reading

Finally, my last goal is to read more. I felt like last year I didn’t read at all and I miss it. I have already started this and am enjoying it a lot. I am going to try to read 10 books this year. I was initially thinking 12 to keep it at one a month, but already I am thinking I want the ability to read longer books and not feel the pressure of having to rush through them.

Achieving These Goals

Rather than getting into specifically when I am going to read or run, what I think is more important is making daily decisions based on these goals. When I plan my day I should think about whether I want time for a run or the gym. That means easily knowing where I sit with these goals. To that end as part of a personal project, and hopefully a future blog post, I plan on making dashboard of sorts that shows my progress on these goals. I am using Strava to record my runs, FitBit for my gym days, the blog posts can be counted easily, and books can be a manual list. I’ve already been brainstorming on this but I hope to put this to actual code soon and get it up and running so I can actually use it.

With these lofty goals in mind I hope they help me strive to make myself better this year.

1. We don’t even want to talk about the other years ↩︎