I’ve got some big goals this year.
My biggest ones involve my fitness. Like going from not doing much activity to competing in endurance events that are longer and harder than any I’ve ever done before. Like re-building my capacity to run double digit mileage, bike a metric century, and swim miles in a wetsuit. Like finding my strength again to be adventure-ready and mentally ready to push harder and go longer even when it’s uncomfortable.
When setting big goals—the hairy, audacious kind that exceed your current capabilities and require you to train, grown, expand, and overcome some limitations to reach them—I like to look at them in the context of the big picture—in this case the calendar year. There are two reasons why.
The first is practical, I need to be sure I have the time. I need to ensure I have plenty of training time for events before I sign up to race them and I need to make sure it won’t conflict with anything else I’m committed to this year. Training while avoiding injury requires a long time and my goal race is in October so I will need to plan when to start training hard and when I can fit in vacations.
The second reason why I like to plan in the context of a full year is that it gives me perspective. Looking at it month-by-month or week-by-week helps me to begin visualizing the journey. It’s particularly helpful for endurance fitness training where I can plot out training phases and key race benchmarks and then schedule smaller milestones to hit along the way. I can then lay in mileage progressions and the bigger blocks of a training plan to be sure I’m not forcing myself to increase mileage too fast and allow for plenty of rest and recovery on the way. I also get to imagine a future where aim capable of doing these harder efforts and visualize my success in a way that helps motivate me when it’s in the teens and I don’t want to do my run.
My October goal race is a 70.3 Ironman Triathlon. That’s a 1.2 mile swim, a 56 mile bike, and. 13.1 mile run. I used to race sprint and Olympic distance triathlons but it’s been several years since I’ve competed and this is over double the longest distance I ever did. I’ve run half marathons before but that was before an injury and again has been years since I’ve regularly run longer than 3-6 miles. I’ve already started to rebuild my run capacity to peak in time for a favorite local half marathon in April but I know I’ll need a solid 6 months of triathlon specific training after that to be in good shape for a 70.3. Plotting that out on a numbered weekly calendar helps me verify it’s possible.
Now that I know when my 6-month triathlon training needs to begin, I realized I had 16 weeks before that in which to train for a half marathon. That coincided nicely with my local run groups training program so I liked them in my planner and started to schedule some pre-triathlon cross training builds in the bike and swim and some solid strength sessions to help me stay injury free.
Putting down my mileage for and times for this initial plan helped me to plan in a build that would get me a good base of fitness for later without increasing my overall mileage too fast. It also helped me prioritize which workouts are essential and which are less so which will help me for getting stressed when I get busy or the training load feels too much and I need to increase recovery.
Obviously this plan will continue to be tweaked and adapted as the year goes on but looking at it all at a glance gives me the confidence to lean into the hard work while knowing where those efforts are taking me. Do you plan anything a year at a time?
