Parveen Kaler

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We are just over a week into 2008 and there have already been people falling off of the New Year’s Resolution bandwagon. One of the biggest problems that I see is that people don’t plan to achieve a goal. Resolutions are wishes to achieve a goal. Barring fairy dust and magic, that is just not going to work.

What is really required is a process to go from a goal to a game plan. Planning is hard. Public and private sector projects slip all of the time. Software projects slip. Construction projects complete over budget. The same will probably be true of your goals.

The usual cause for these types of slippages are events that haven’t been accounted for. Going over last year, I can name significant events in my life occurring every month or two. These events may include a major milestones at work, a dream vacation, a visit from relatives, a relationship makeup or breakup.

These events are inevitable. If you are not experiencing major events in your life, then you should consider re-evaluating what you have been up to.

I’ve seen the opposite end of the spectrum too. I have friends that disappear for a week at the end of the year to work on their goals. The equivalent in the corporate world are off-site planning meetings.

What I do is a quick jam session that lasts an hour or two at most. The plan looks forward about 12 to 16 weeks. If I was in the mood to kill trees, it would fit on one 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper.

I plan to finish the Vancouver Half-Marathon on May 4th. Here are the details of my plan:

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Jan 6, 2008 – May 4, 2008
- 17 weeks

Currently:
6.5 km in 40 mins at about 9.75 km/h

Goal:
21 km in 120 mins at 10.5 km/h
(Some other possible projections)
115 mins at 11 km/h
110 mins at 11.5 km/h
105 mins at 12 km/h

Difference:
80 mins and 14.5 km

Iteration – Each week:
Add 5 mins and almost 1 km

Calendar:
Tuesday – Short Run
- Start at about 40 mins and work up to 75 mins
- Possibly do intervals for speed work

Thursday – Long Run
- This is where I add 5 mins each week

Flexibility:
- Always try to run the actual marathon route
- Use treadmill on days with bad weather or less time
- Try to get the run in the first thing in the morning
- Try to schedule short runs at lunch time if I have to
- Otherwise run after work
- If I miss a day, just shift runs a day that week to Wednesday and Friday

Support System:
- blog
- forums
- Traineo
- data from Garmin 305 GPS unit

Next Action:
- Go to Running Room website and make a list of 3-5 shoes that I will try on in-store

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There you go. That is my entire plan.

The plan states where I am at the moment and what the end goal is. It focuses on numbers that are easy to understand. The plan focuses on iteration. Each iteration is a week long and I know the pace I need to maintain for each iteration.

There is a scheduling and calendar portion to the plan. I slot my two runs into Google Calendar. However, my calendar is flexible. If I can’t run at the planned time, I have 3 other contingencies.

Support System

A support system can be critical to achieving your goal. At minimum, the people in your life should realize why you are not taking on extra work or showing up to an event. You’re busy. Let people know why you’re busy.

Next Actions

Next actions are the physical, visible things you can do right now to achieve your goal. Your next action should be specific enough that it can be completed in a couple minutes to a couple hours.

Your next action should have a pointer to the next action after you’ve completed this action. I used to maintain long ToDo lists for all of the projects that I had in my life. This was a big waste of effort and brain-space. Once I arrived at a task on my ToDo list, it was usually not relevant anymore.

Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. There is all of this crap that we keep in our email inboxes, in our Documents folders, the junk drawer, and our storage rooms. Worst of all we keep all of this crap in our brain.

All of this crap gunks up our mental passageways. Throw all of that crap out. Relax and just enjoy the current task that you are working on. Everything will be all right.

Keep It Simple

I have been lifting weights for more than 12 years now. I wasted so many years reading magazines and trying to lift like the professional bodybuilders and powerlifters. The advice from these pros is mostly irrelevant. A bodybuilder is trying to make a particular striation on a particular head of a particular muscle to pop more. Irrelevant to 99% of people in the gym.

My first reaction was to head to the book store and grab a couple running magazines and then search the web for some good running websites. Then I realized that would be a big waste of time for minimal improvement on the plan that I already have in place.

I am going to focus on becoming a cleaner runner and focus on improving my range. Period.