Out of catchy titles

I’ve taken some time over the past few days to develop a few goals. Short term goals and long term goals. As part of this process I decided that my long term goals will be universal goals that will help me work to general success in life – as such these goals will be stupid simple goals, but because I’ve picked them out will be a bit tough to accomplish. I’ve also decided on a couple of short term goals (triathlon specific) that will give me something to focus on for the next 6 to 12 months. Anyways here are my long term goals:

• Develop my relationship with Mary by expressing a “profound” thought every day
• Make all attempts to be in bed and falling asleep by 9:45 pm every night
• Spend less time on the internet/computer
• Read (a book) for at least 15 minutes a day
• Be less judgemental of people
• Try to be a team player
• Workout every day

Like I said on the surface they are stupid simple goals, but in reality they are all things that are highly important to me as a person, but I have a very difficult time doing.

It should be noted that I wrote the short term goals section out, and then took well over an hour to click submit and record them publically, reading my earlier blog about why I maintain this website helped me along.

My short term goals are much more specific and are meant to give me focus and drive in my training over the next 6 to 12 months. I view these goals as not a destination, but a guide point to achieving my ultimate potential, I may or may not achieve these goals in the next 6 to 12 months, but that’s about as far ahead as I can focus. Ultimately I’d like to try and word these goals in a way similar to my long term goals, but I’m just not mentally ready to cope with short term goals of that nature.

• Develop the fitness to execute a 9 hour Ironman
  • 50 minute swim
  • 4:50 bike
  • 3:10 run
• Finish my website

Do I have another big time drop in my Ironman career or have I hit the inch by inch improvement phase? I don’t know, only time will tell and I’ll do my best to reach this guide point.

In other news training has been OK. I did a fitness test on my bike this past Friday. A nice warmup, followed by a 30 minute time trial (on the trainer). The metric is the average HR of the last 20 minutes of the TT. I ended up with 161, I was really happy with that result. The last time I did this I “scored” 149 (about 2 years ago, shame on me). That’s an improvement a 5 bpm per year of training which from my reading is pretty good, especially considering the limited amount of intensity I do. I was really surprised at how badly that ride beat me up, I was going to do the same test for running on Sunday, but my heart rate monitor froze on me. In hindsight that is probably for the best as I would have been complete toasted. Other then that the weekend consisted of a 4:30 bike ride with Mary, which considering my fitness test the night before was pretty challenging – she got a flat tire on it too!

This week is more of the same, planning to try to check my ego at the door at tonight’s group ride and ride in my new zones. I also put my powercranks back on, I have some worries about how to reintegrate them into my training given the number of races in the next few months, but I hate to leave such great tools to gather dust.

More to come later this week!