Goals focused on – the process.

There is always a lot of discussion this time of year about the coming year. The health focused people talk about resolutions, athletes generally like to talk about race and training schedules. I have seen quite a bit of talk around the blog world focused on this with triathletes and runners.

Take a little journey over to Zappoman’s blog and read some of his posts. He has talked a lot about how he is approaching his season, plus he has discussed a couple posts that we’ve made here at Mideast Multisport. Another blog post that I saw just now on this topic was posted at Bette L. Hall’s Running Journal.

One thing that I have noticed in most of the posts is that they relate to “x hours of running,” “periodization” or “x race”. Our posts here at Mideast Multisport have definitely had that kind of approach so far, but I want to share another thought that might be helpful:

Become dedicated to “the process” as much as you are dedicated to “the outcome!”

What do I mean by this? I mean that it is good have some goals built into your season that are process oriented and not outcome focused. I have found over the last 9 years of training for endurance events that when I have an outcome based goal I had a difficult time achieving that goal. (A recent example would be my 2006 Derby Marathon.) On the other hand, I have seen my best performances come when I have had one or two process goals built into my program.

Another Example:

In 1999 I had two goals: 1. finish a marathon 2. qualify for the Boston marathon. Of course I didn’t qualify for Boston in 1999 – not even close. When I had a really big break through in my running is when I joined the Todd’s Road Stumblers in 2002 (when I moved to Lexington) and had a goal in the fall to “not miss a Saturday run”.

That goal lead to a really important factor in my improvement – I ran more miles consistently than I had in the previous 4 years.

Last summer I mentioned in my personal blog a process goal that I would try and accomplish in 2007. I felt that it would help me improve my Ironman abilities. That goal was to complete a 20/20, or 20 consecutive weeks of 20+ hours of training. Looking at that goal right now it doesn’t really look possible for 2007. The 20 hour mark is pretty close to my “limit” at the moment, so doing that 20 weeks in a row would be pretty challenging. But you get the point of setting a process goal (maybe I’ll try a 30/15?).

When many people set goals and develop their training plans they like to look at the end result of the season. That is an important aspect to planning your season, but you won’t achieve your goals just by writing them on paper or publishing them in your blog. You will achieve your dreams by all the hard work you put in during the year.

Make sure you have some “all the hard work” goals or as I’ve been calling them “process goals.” If you would like, share some process goal ideas in the comments and we’ll all see at the end of 2007 if we were able to meet those challenges. — I’ll start.

Gary Ditsch