How To Review Your 2019 Goals

And Plan For 2020

I hope this finds everyone enjoying a great time with family and friends and looking forward to a fun and successful 2020.  I wanted to take a minute to look at how we recommend patients and clients review their past year and use that to plan for the future.  The obvious first place to start is by looking at your goals for 2019 that you set and seeing if you reach them, but here’s a curve-ball, that is not where I like to start.  I like to start by asking an easy question, “Did you enjoy yourself?” Did you have fun? Did it feel like you had a good balance between family time and training? Or did you feel like your training ruled your life for the year?  Sometimes (OK always) this question is best tackled with friends and family. Sometimes you as the athlete felt everything was in great balance, but your family disagrees.

Once you determine the answer to the first question, then you can move on and take a look at your specific goals that you set out for the year.  Did you set out to run a new distance, were you looking to train more consistently? Were you trying to enter new disciplines, or lose weight? No matter what the goal was, go back and look at them and see how you did.  For the goals you hit, give yourself a pat on the back. For the ones you didn’t hit write them down on a piece of paper and jot down next to them why you didn’t hit them? Did you get sidelined by injury? Did you reach a little too far? Did you over commit?  Did life simply not cooperate?  

The next step is going to be taking a look at all of your reasons for not hitting goals, are there any commonalities between the different goals, and the reasons you didn’t hit them?  If there are, we are going to start there and see what we can do to resolve those things that kept us from hitting those goals. Maybe we need to enlist our family and friends to keep us honest, or try and take some things off our plate when we need to train.  Maybe we need to give them permission to yell at us if we get off track, or maybe we need a partner or training buddy to help keep us accountable. Now there may be some goals that we missed, due to reasons simply beyond our control and that’s ok, but we want to take this time to do our best to solve any problems we can.   (I know what you are thinking, “What if we hit all of our goals?” Don’t worry that’s coming up.)

Now let’s start picking goals for 2020!  When we pick fitness or training goals, I like to get people to break them into 3 categories:

1. Health/Lifestyle – Things that revolve around simply improving your health and wellness
2. Training/Racing – Competitive goals
3. Reach For The Stars – Things that will be really challenging to achieve, but still possible

Pick 2-3 things in each category, write them down, and make sure to share them with family, friends, anyone that will help and support you.  The hardest part about these sorts of goals is sticking to them when things get hard, and at some point they will.

I hope everyone had a great 2019 and here is to an amazing 2020!!