Thursday, May 19, 2011

Goals, eh

I dislike goals. Being a (somewhat) high-achieving, driven person, you'd think I have a three-page bucket list broken down into personal, professional, & fitness goals. Not I. For me, having a goal means there is something I cannot do that I must work to improve myself at before having some event that declares me officially competent. No thank you!

The goals I set are typically ambiguous ones along the lines of "try to be nicer" or "don't get terribly out of shape." Goals like this don't involve a high level of commitment out of me, it works out well! I'm not accountable for performing up to a certain level at the blow of a whistle, and I don't have to take any steps in the meantime to try to incrementally "get better." Plus, everything is on a relative scale, so if I am not very nice to someone there are plenty of excuses available to self-rationalize my nastiness and to try harder next time. I'm not opposed to gaining new skills or learning things, but saying "I'm going to read 100 books by the end of this year," has never really appealed to me.

It's possible I'm just lazy & scared of failure. I am also averse to spending a huge quantity of time on any one thing in life, but that's kind of beside the point.

So it's probably a good time to set some goals. Fitness goals are usually the easiest for me, so that's what it'll be!

Goal #1- Be able to hike a 14er in 8 weeks when I'm in Colorado with my family. Ok, so that's kind of an ambiguous goal, but I have a concrete path I'm following. I'm following a 4 week fitness shape-up I saw in a magazine. It's two days of cardio intervals & two days of weight lifting each week. I'm supplementing with additional endurance cardio & yoga. And the occasional game of ultimate tennis which is WAY more fun than traditional (pretentious) tennis. In 4 weeks, the crazy-intense, 6:00 AM community workouts start which involve lots of running hills, lunges, and overall kick-in-the-buttness that is necessary for doing a 14er.

Goal #2- Do 100 pushups in 6 weeks. This is something Britt from Snapurly suggested. Today was day two of week 1!

Maybe if these go well I'll be more likely to set more goals. Who wants to do 100 pushups with me??!!

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