Goals

Today marked the official start to the race season for me. I’m not competitive in these things by any means but calling it a race season makes it seem like I know what I’m doing. Signup, run, don’t die. Pretty much in that order. In the end, its all about knocking out one of my goals for 2012.

There were a lot of things different about the Red Flannel Run in 2012 compared to last year. First and foremost, the temps. Last year we were in the mid-30s and I was warm as could be in my gear. This year, I wore pretty much the same thing except the temps were 7 degrees with a -6 windchill. It was cold out there. But with the gear I had on and the running, I warmed up pretty quickly. I just wish I would have had some sort of neck gator on. That would have made a pretty big difference for me. I kept having some breathing issues after the first 1.5 miles and I’m pretty sure it was due to things (mouth, lungs etc) freezing up a bit.

On the 1st of the year, I put our my usual public goals for 2012. I have some typical goals in there of some fitness goals, career type goals and general health goals. Some of these are pretty cut and dry to track progress. I want to run 5 5K races, pretty straight forward.

But how do you track something like getting more sleep?

Here is where Mercury App comes in. I’ve been using this product for over a year now and have mainly been tracking things like my weight and job satisfaction. Adding to it Sleep time, not only how I feel about the sleep I got but actually tracking the number of hours should give me a good overall graph at the end of the year of how well I did in getting that 7+ average that I’m looking for.

If you’re going to go to the time to make goals, you might as well make them public. So in the keeping with my tradition of past years, here are my 2012 Goals:

• I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while now. Late nights programming or just messing around on the internet have been the norm for years for me. My average time to bed is 12-12:30. Not an issue if you can sleep until 8. But I get up at 6-6:30 if not earlier based on the little bosses schedule. My goal, move the bed time up an hour and get 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Goal #1: Sleep More!

As we come to the end of 2011, its time for the annual review of goals and another declaration of next years goals. So let’s wind them down and see how we did.

• Goal #1: Continue to work less. – SUCCESS! I consider this one more about family time than anything else. Family time has a high value to me and to be honest, I get pretty cranky when work interferes with that time. From 5-8 at night, I’m pretty much off limits unless its something involving my family. So while I’ve put in more hours on the side business this year at night and on weekends, the little boss gets my attention while he is awake. So I consider this one a success!
• Goal #2: Drink more water – FAIL. I’d like to blame this purely on my little on and the lack of sleep that I get, but in reality, he’s fallen into a nice pattern of sleep and this is really due to the side business keeping me up at night.
• Goal #3: Ship Code – FAIL. Sure I’ve written a lot of code this year and I have gotten several new web sites out the door. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to write and ship on of my iPhone app ideas. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, but haven’t gotten it out the door.
• Goal #4: Write a new blog article every week – SUCCESS! OK, maybe I should take partial credit on this one. The frequency hasn’t been exactly 1 post per week. But my average is there! As of this article, I have posted 56 articles in 2011. I’d like to have more posts but we’re making progress.
• Goal #5: Run in 3 5k races – SUCCESS. I destroyed this one accomplishing this goal by middle of the year. I want to have a fitness goal for 2012 again and it will probably be along these same lines, but I want to stretch it out and make it last the whole year long.

3 out of 5. 60%. This is not acceptable. Making progress from the 50% I hit in 2010, but we still have a long ways to go.

So far, I’m off to a good start in completing one of my goals for 2011. Its not a huge stretch goal for me, but it keeps me in a certain shape in order to complete goal #5, run 3 5K races in a year.

Race #1 is in the bag. Considering it was run on 2/12 in Iowa, you would expect absolutely freezing temps. To be honest, I was overdressed seeing as it was in the mid 30s at the start of the race. And I was only wearing a tshirt, long sleeve T and then a sweatshirt. I should have dumped the sweatshirt but I was solo on this one and didn’t have a good person to hand it off to on the route.