Setting goals

It's that time again...to begin laying the groundwork for next season by setting your goals.   

To get you started I have stolen borrowed some talking points from a past Joe Friel blog post.  He suggest answering the following questions:

Did I meet my 2012 goals?

Did I follow my training plan (you had one, didn’t you)?

Did I address my limiters?

Was I able to stick to my training schedule?

Was I satisfied with my race results?

Be open and honest in your self-evaluation so that you can begin formulating a foundation for improvement. 

While you may know right offhand which areas your want to work on, there are some other ways to pinpoint them.  Often your race results will give you lots of insight into your limiters and areas that need special focus.  If you track your splits in a race, they can show you whether you went out too fast and faded and how close you were to that coveted negative split.   

In triathlon you can even compare your times across each discipline to age group, gender and overall results.  Seeing how you stack up against the field can go a long way in showing you the areas that need improvement.  Personally, I know from reviewing my results that my run has been a definite limiter and is something I plan to spend a lot of time improving this upcoming year. 

Once you get an idea of what you need to work on start developing a plan of action and be as specific as possible in how you can achieve that goal.  Using my weakness (the run) as an example - I'm not merely planning to run more to get better results.  I've started working on a plan that includes SPECIFIC markers.  In a future post I will discuss some of the specific areas that I plan to focus on for next year....stayed tuned.   

As we approach the new year, I'd love to hear your feedback on this process.