2015: The New Year…review or resolution? Part 1

I will be posting two blogs on the same idea; on setting new goals for 2015. This is because I didn’t want readers to get overwhelmed by one massive essay and I wanted to create discussion around each part. In this post I will be exploring why we shouldn’t just jump into 2015, but look back on 2014 and realise what was good as well as bad about that year. Understanding what we experienced in 2014 can allow us to build goals for 2015, without setting ourselves up to fail for the rest of the year.

I have taken a long time to write my next blog post; to make sure that I got all my thoughts down about beginning the New Year. I wanted to discuss whether we are all too quick to decide what goals we will set for this year, when really we should be looking back at the previous year and seeing what worked as well as what didn’t. I’m sure you’ve seen it or done it yourself, whereby you promise you will start a new project or hobby and then somehow or other this resolution to yourself falls by the wayside. I am as guilty as anyone else; in my previous post I said that I was going to email a local running club to see about joining them. I can give you any number of excuses, like I was worried about whether they would be friendly or not, but ultimately I didn’t email them. I am not criticising people who set out to do new things or set resolutions. I am posing the question(s) of whether we set ourselves up to fail by not looking back over the previous year’s accomplishment, have we really asked ourselves why we are setting out on a particular activity or course and are we just following the latest trend/ fad in the hope that it will solve issues that are not really related to running (or exercise for that matter)?

William Henry Davies wrote a lovely poem called ‘Leisure’, which I think relates wonderfully to life in many ways and in some ways to running as well:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I think sometimes we all get caught up in chasing personal bests, competing in certain races and pushing ourselves ever further; I think that is part of the buzz that we all get from running and I certainly know that I get way too obsessed about this. What I think the poem provides is a brilliant illustration to runners about getting us to look back on when we took our first steps into running. How many times do we look back at the previous year(s) and really appreciate what we have accomplished? Sure you could have improved your 10km race time by over ‘x’ number of minutes recently, but what about when you entered your first 10km race. Maybe you were feeling nervous, happy, excited or all of those things rolled into one? Like the poem says sometimes it is healthy just ‘to stand and stare’; simply to realise how far we have come. My point is that just because you want to achieve great things in 2015 it doesn’t stop you from looking back at all your accomplishments in 2014. You could have been injured or sick in 2014 and now have recovered. That in itself is a massive achievement; just alone for the mental resilience to keep faith and overcome the problem in front of you. Ultimately I think when we look back at our accomplishments it gives us the strength to move forward and go out and achieve new things. I think it suits the fitness industry a lot more than us to say that: ‘January 2015 is a New Year, a New You!’ When really we are a sum of what we were –and have done- whilst constantly existing in the present moment. There is a bias to look forward at the beginning of each year without remembering where we came from and to me that seems almost nihilistic.

Are you setting yourself up to fail?

The one thing that always seems to happen each year is what I call the Nike Attitude to starting something new or beginning a resolution, people ‘just do it’ without any thought for what is needed to obtain that goal. We all see things like a triathlon or a marathon and think; ‘I should do that!’ There is nothing wrong with that attitude; if we didn’t take risks then no one would get anywhere. For instance, my first road race was the Kent Coastal Half Marathon in September 2011. Being completely honest I didn’t have a clue about training or preparation for a half-marathon, other than if I could run 8 miles then I stood a pretty good chance of completing the race. Personally I think I was lucky, as I said in my previous blog I had always run small distances of 3 to 5 miles and played rugby as well. So I had a reasonable base of fitness to start running. That said if I had decided to do an ironman triathlon in 2011, instead of the half-marathon, then I do not think my first proper endurance event would have been nearly half as fun and I would have felt pretty miserable at the end of it. Of course we read about the unique individuals who in less than 3-6 months complete an ironman event or ultramarathon without ever having run a race before, but what you are less likely to hear about is the gruelling hours of work they put in to achieve that goal or in some cases that they were already a successful athlete in another sport.

To be clear I am not trying to stop people from signing up for races or any other events that you like. That’s half the fun of trying new things; you never know what is going to happen. What I am trying to show is that you can make your goals smaller, so that you can build up to even bigger things. It’s about what you think is a challenge. Not what the neighbour next door thinks, society or the latest advert says. If you think you would be better running a 5km race than a 10km, then go for it. That way you get the best of both worlds, having a goal that is not impossible but at the same time setting yourself an objective that is going to stretch you. A good way of doing this is writing a mission statement. You may like me when you first hear the words ‘mission statement’ think, that’s only for companies not people. However it is a great way of making a personal commitment to yourself about what you want to achieve for the year. It doesn’t just have to be about what you want to achieve but who you want to be as well. A good place to start for people who want to know more about mission statements is the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.  Besides setting out what I want to get out from the year my mission statement will also include quotes of inspiring figures who I would like to aspire to, my strengths and weaknesses as well as a reason for why I set out to do those things listed in the mission statement. To be very open with you about my running, I will be putting down in my mission statement that one of my weaknesses is that I am too competitive and lose sight of enjoying my running. I think the most useful thing about a mission statement is that when things get tough, and at some point they will during the year, you have something to refer back to about where you want to be heading- a bit like a map or a compass when you are lost. This link includes an example of what a mission statement could look like and what you could say to yourself as encouragement when times are tough: http://kalidora.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/advice_for_your_18_year_old_self.png .The most important thing you have to ask yourself is why are you doing something and be really honest with yourself when reflecting on this question. It is easier said than done and I think it is more of an evolutionary process than a radical change.

Be SMART

Sometimes the problem maybe that you know what you want to do, but you don’t know how to make that idea into something you can do on a weekly basis to achieve your overall goal. Say you want to do your first 10km race and you have never run more than a mile before at the very most; it is not going to be easy to work out how to prepare for completing a race like that. This is where the acronym SMART comes in. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. This means that your idea, in this case a 10km race, can be broken down into smaller tasks to complete the overall objective of finishing the race. Depending on your training method- whether it be miles completed per week or number of minutes spent running- you can decide that you will run on a plan based on the SMART acronym. Specific could be when will you run during the week, measurable will be that you have a target number of miles/ minutes to run on those days, achievable is ensuring you can actually fit running alongside the other priorities in your life, relevant could be the type of training you do (i.e. doing bicep curls at the gym is not going to make you a better runner) and time-bound would be to do with having completed your training plan before the race date. The good thing about SMART is that you can adapt it to any of your training situations, making it very flexible. I have chosen this picture below, as I find it always helps me when I am trying to create a plan or progressing through one.

 

 Get by with a little help from my friends

When beginning your training things can seem quite overwhelming. There is not only the stress of having to cope with implementing a change in your day-to-day life, but you also want to know you are doing things correctly, to a good enough standard and you want feedback on how you can improve or avoid making mistakes. To this end getting feedback from your friends, acquaintances and/or people you run with is a great way to see how you are doing. One of the best feedback models for seeking advice that I have come across in my career is the Johari Window. I am not saying that this is the best method for communicating with people, as there is no one-size fits all approach, but the model allows you to group the way people comment on how you run. The Johari Window has many practical purposes, but for the intention of this blog it is primarily geared towards personal development through seeking responses from people you think can provide constructive criticism about your running and strengths/ weaknesses. The Johari Window is made up of four regions and this is how they work:-

1. what is known by the person about him/herself and is also known by others - open area, open self, free area, free self, or 'the arena'
2. what is unknown by the person about him/herself but which others know - blind area, blind self, or 'blindspot'
3. what the person knows about him/herself that others do not know - hidden area, hidden self, avoided area, avoided self or 'facade'
4. what is unknown by the person about him/herself and is also unknown by others - unknown area or unknown self

(http://www.businessballs.com/johariwindowmodel.htm)

With these windows you should have a pretty good understanding of window one; so for instance you and your friends know that you hate getting up early in the morning, and this means that planning your running schedule around early morning routines is probably not a good idea. Window two is very useful because it allows you to get another person’s perspective on a problem that you are experiencing or a behavioural trait that you do not recognise. A good example of this is when someone points out an aspect of yourself that you immediately find uncomfortable; it could be a statement like: ’You find it hard to pace yourself’. Instead of trying to deny the statement try exploring what you actually think and feel about it. You may find that there are some interesting insights to be found even if you don’t agree with what the other person has said. The third window is interesting because it involves what we talked about earlier in the blog post, about being honest with yourself about what you are doing as well as why you are doing it. This is because window three is only what you know about yourself and it is not known by anyone else. If you know that your goal is running a certain distance/ race but you are not putting the training in for that event, then it is only you who can make that change to stop yourself from failing to reach that objective. I am not advocating being hard on yourself or getting annoyed that you missed a training session, instead I am suggesting that maybe you seek advice from friends/ a personal trainer. It is not easy, but if you can be receptive to exploring the ideas in windows two and three, then you can find real gains in window four. This is where feedback from others combined with your own personal questions/ insights allows you to discover new aspects about yourself or your running. So to continue with the examples I have used so far of someone saying you find it hard to pace yourself and not completing the training. This allows you and the other person to look at your training schedule and reevaluate how you train. This could lead to you running for a set amount of time, rather than having distances to run for each of your training runs.

I think the Johari Window is a great way of understanding how to seek feedback as well as viewing your own personal development around a goal. I don’t think it can be a one off exercise, rather something you use alongside your mission statement to see if you are on the right path to achieving your goals. I also want to stress that it is not a method for how you communicate with people when seeking feedback. The best advice is to keep an open mind when someone says something about you, especially if you strongly disagree with it.

The hardest part of any journey is taking that first step

After talking about goals for most of this blog, reflecting on why you want to achieve them and how to go about setting them. I wanted to discuss the goals themselves, as it is always good to remember that no goal is too small to have or want to achieve. By this I mean that if you want to run, it doesn’t mean that you have to enter ultra-marathon, a marathon, a half marathon, a 10km, a 5km or any type of race at all. It just means that you want to start running, and the changes you have to start making to achieve this do not have to be monumental. On a personal level when I moved from Kent to London I found it quite a shock, as it took longer to get to work and I was further away from the nearest park. I decided apprehensively to run to from work once a week. I won’t lie to you, it was not an easy thing to do. There are numerous things to think about such as equipment, planning for what you bring to work, drying off your kit and not least running through a crowded as well as aggressive city (I will be writing a post about running to and from work, as I think it is something that is becoming increasingly popular in London). It was a small change, in the sense that there was no distance or time that I set myself to run home in, and I allowed time to adjust for it. Therefore if you do not know where to start with running, just think about how running can fit around your general routine and then see where that journey takes you. Even though this is a UK website about running I think it is very helpful in illustrating the idea about fitting running around your life and provides tips on running to work: https://www.run2work.com/

I hope you have enjoyed the first part of this blog post about setting goals for 2015. In the second part I will be discussing how to stick with the plan by finding out what motivates you to keep going when things are not so great, being kinder to yourself and how to resolve making those difficult choices to achieve your goals. Let me know what your plans are for sticking to your goals for 2015 and anything you want to add to the ideas I have put forward.