Will Run 4 Food

Every year after the holidays we take stock of our lives and come up with a new set of resolutions for the coming days. Often these "resolutions" are overly ambitious and lofty pronouncements created after the two weeks of sheer gluttony and laziness we call "The Holidays". While made in good faith, these resolutions are often so ambiguous and unrealistic that we leave ourselves room only to fail. When a news anchor for CNN was asked what his resolution was he happily announced "I want to be a better husband and father." What does that even mean? Laughing, Josh said "it means he wants to stop cheating on his wife." Fair enough.

Thinking about Mr. News Anchor brings me to a good point about these resolutions: we set our sights on this improbable goal without any roadmap to get there. What good is 'I want to be a better father' if "i will stop cheating on my wife' is not included? Exactly. In the January 2012 issue of RunnersWorld, Ed Eyestone examines this problem with runners and comes to a similar conclusion. If you want to succeed, you need to set a defined goal and focus on the specific requirements for reaching it. For 2012 I have a couple of running and non-running related goals, and here are my plans for reaching them!

Run a Marathon

- Derby Festival Marathon April 25 2012

- Create a training plan and post it on the fridge (DONE!)

- Find a running group/partner to complete long runs 

- Run at least one 20 miler

- Use the blog & daily mile to keep me accountable for my training

Healthy Body for the Wedding

(Best way I could think of to say 'lose weight' without actually saying it)

- Maintain free lifetime Weight Watchers membership in 2012

- Try new vegetables and recipes! Add good finds to the blog

- Take stock of what I'm eating, how I feel, & how it effects me (30 day food journal challenge)

- Continue my effort to take the word "Fat" out of my vocabulary

Keep the Apartment Clean

(this one is my adult goal, mostly because having a messy apartment stresses me out!)

- Start from a "clean" slate by floor to ceiling scrub down (Done!)

- Bi-weekly cleaning on Sundays 

- Empty sink at night (no dirty dishes in the sink overnight!)

So it's taken me a little time to get these worked out, but I think I'm on the right track! One week down, 51 to go. You may note that there are a few big ticket items absent form this list (i.e. graduate from law school, pass the bar, get married). As far as I'm concerned, those aren't "goals" in the traditional sense. What it takes to accomplish/achieve those things was set in motion long ago and there's little I could do now to alter those outcomes. But I'll probably keep you up to date on all of that stuff too, you know, just in case ;)

Happy Monday Everybody!