New Year, New Goals

With a new year coming in just a few days, it’s time to set some new running goals.

The beginning of a new year can present you with an opportunity, a fresh start. A chance to completely overhaul everything you have done in the past.

For 2022, that’s not the case for me.

I view this new year as a chance to continue working towards my overall goals, which I have gotten closer and closer to over the last few years. I feel like I just need to make a few tweaks to what I have been doing and that will allow me to be successful.

As I said in my post from March – Setting Yourself Up For Success, I always think that goals should be specific and difficult but they should also be obtainable. That’s at least what I have in mind while I am setting my goals.

When I began thinking of my goals for 2022, everything pointed to one main target, which you will see shortly – unless you have taken a peek ahead!

Having goals to work towards over manageable time periods (week, month, year) can help to keep you motivated.

Here are my main goals that I’d like to accomplish during 2022:

Qualify for The Boston Marathon

I guess this one is pretty self-explanatory.

After my 1st marathon in 2005, I was 2 hours and 40 minutes away from the qualifying standard for Boston. Now, 16 years later, after the Philadelphia Marathon in November, I am a little more than 11 minutes away from the qualifying standard.

Until the past couple of years, I wouldn’t have considered qualifying for Boston to be a realistic goal at all. So unrealistic, in fact, that it rarely even entered my mind until 2019.

Now, it’s the main goal.

Hard work and steady progress the last several years have put me into what I believe is good position to achieve it in 2022!

In order to best prepare myself to achieve this, I need to focus on…

Quality over Quantity

When I have set my yearly goals in the past, they have mostly been based on the total distance that I want to run for the year. This year, with the main target being to qualify for Boston, I won’t have a mileage goal for 2022.

Just by the nature of my training plan, I will still be running a lot of miles some weeks or months, but mileage will not be what I base my training on. Instead, while I am in a training cycle for a specific race, I will be focused only on the training plan and what the daily or weekly workouts are. Outside of the training cycles, I plan to just maintain my fitness and keep everything in working order.

This one will actually feel different to me because I’m used to keeping an eye on my mileage totals as a measurement of how I am doing.

Continue Streaking

My running streak has never really been about running every day.

That might sound weird, but the main goal with it is and always was to maintain consistency. It’s just that the best way for me to stay consistent has been to run every day because it has taken away most of the “should I or shouldn’t I run” discussion in my mind on any given day.

With my running streak now approaching 1,500 days (which I will reach on January 1, 2022 if all goes well the next 2 days), I have no intention of ending the streak any time soon.

Since running has become part of my daily routine, I think I can still achieve my other goals while keeping the streak going. I just need to be smarter and more focused on how I am feeling during my training cycles to avoid injury and feeling worn down.

Races as Progress Tests

Races provide me with the best measurement tool that I am in shape and continuing to progress towards my goals.

Races are supposed to be fun. And while they usually are, the main goal as I have said before is always to use them as a test. Sometimes, a race is used to test that my training is progressing properly to get me ready for the “goal” race of my training cycle. Other times, the race is the end result or final test of the training cycle.

Hopefully, 2022 will give me many opportunities to race. As of right now, I haven’t officially registered for any races, but my plan as it stands will be to run two marathons as my goal races – one in the spring and one in the fall. As part of those training cycles, I would then have at least one half marathon during the buildup to each of those races.

While all of my goals are geared towards helping me qualify for the Boston Marathon, there are still smaller pieces within each of them that I would consider achievements.

So, those are my goals for 2022!

If you want to share yours or just your main goal for 2022, then I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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More From RunPatRun:

• Next Week: 2021 was probably my best year of running and I’ll be recapping the successes and failures that I had during the past year.
• RunPatRun Race Series: I still have a few more posts I’m working on to add to the Race Series. In the weeks and months ahead, I will have a post for two more of my favorite races – Seattle Marathon and Munich Marathon – as well as a Bucket List of races that I’d like to run in the future!