Goals For 2011

What I love most about New Years is making resolutions. It's so empowering to feel like the slate is clean and anything is possible. I usually spend most of December planning out what I want to accomplish in the next year. I don't always reach all my goals. Sometimes it's lack of planning and accountability. Other times I have a shift in focus during the year. I thought I would share some of my health and fitness goals for 2011 here in hopes that they will be more tangible.

In 2008 I ran 563 miles. In 2009 I made a commitment to increase my mileage and I hit 1,241 miles. In doing so I dramatically improved my finishing times. For 2010 I had planned to break 2,000 miles, but with Leo's birth I pulled back on my schedule and only ended up running 1,801 miles. More importantly though, I accomplished my goal of not getting injured at all this year. I attribute most of that to switching from a heal strike to landing on my forefoot. My goal for 2011 is to increase my mileage again. My stretch goal is to run 2,500 miles with a secondary goal of 2,200 miles. The reason is that I think it will improve my running times and better prepare me for my longer races, which happen to be some of my other goals.

One of my goals this past year was to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I managed to do that at the Detroit Marathon with a time of 3:08:19, just a few minutes under the qualifying time for my age group. It was a lot closer than I had planned. With a half marathon best of 1:21:16 I should be able to run under a 3 hour marathon. So for 2011 I'm again setting a goal of breaking 3 hours in the marathon. To do it I need to keep my pace up after mile 18, which running more should help with. I'm planning on running both a spring and fall marathon to give myself more than one chance.

For the past few years I've been thinking about doing an ultra marathon. With my increased mileage I think I can handle a 50 miler.

I bought a body fat scale a few months ago and it's great to finally see the data that's important. For several years I've been weighing myself daily, but I didn't have any idea what my body composition was. I can now set a weight goal based on body fat percentage rather than total body weight. Currently I'm at 13.5% body fat and I want to get that down to 8%, which is at the bottom of the healthy range. That works out to about 10 pounds of fat that I'm going to try and drop over 10 months. To do it I'll need to maintain an average 120 calorie deficit each day. I think this will be my hardest goal to meet. Because of that, I would still be happy if I could get down to 10% and be able to maintain that for the rest of the year.

I decided that I would also try maintaining a strength training program to improve my endurance. The plan is to do 3 sessions a week until summer and then scale back to maintenance levels. The goal isn't to get a six pack or bulk up. The idea is to strengthen the parts of my body that are yelling at me 20 miles into a marathon. But if I ended up looking ripped I wouldn't mind ;-)

Here's to an awesome 2011. Best of luck meeting any of the goals you set this year.