New Year's Resolutions

In December 2016 I set a few New Year’s Resolutions. Like millions of others, I have tried and failed in the past. I am an advocate of changing your life today rather than waiting for tomorrow or a specific date, so why set NYRs?

There’s something powerful about the changing of a year, I had intentions that just happened to arrive before the new year so I married the two together; I wanted to run and cycle faster and further, and I also wanted to be more consistent in my writing. 2016 featured a lot of manic writing (I wrote 40,000 words in a month) followed by uninspired periods of emptiness.

So, with those motivations in mind, I set the following goals:

• Finish my novella ‘Blackout’
• Log spending daily
• Run 1,000 miles
• Cycle 2,000 miles

(+3 other run/cycle targets, all achieved.)

I only failed the first goal. Instead of finishing Blackout I wrote Idle Riot, edited it multiple times and polished it. I’m happy with that.

I wanted to know how much I spent on things like food, cycling equipment and pretty much everything else. I paid for almost everything by card so all I needed to do was check my online banking and enter the figures into a spreadsheet. It took less than five minutes a day, the amount of time I spent brushing my teeth.

The 1,000/2,000 mile targets seemed like distances that would be challenging but not all encompassing. Running 20 miles per week would take three hours and cycling 40 miles per week would take two and a half. They were also targets that would lead me to consistency.

Training for a sportive at the end of February, combined with commuting throughout March meant I surpassed my cycling target on 23^rd April. Conversely, I ran once in the first nine weeks of the year. Still, it was 38.2 marathons not a sprint. After completing my cycling goal so early in the year, I set an ambitious goal of 5,000 miles and came up ~675 miles short. I knew that would be a stretch. I completed 1,000 miles run on 12^th December, and ended the year with over 1,100 miles.

As well as running and cycling further and faster, I looked to my training to provide clarity of thought to aide me to write more fluently and regularly. I had no objective way of measuring this but I felt it was achieved. This blog, university work and personal writing feels stronger and my approach is now more consistent.

A few years ago I read an article that advocated finding an entirely unrelated hobby (the article was about strength training) and, as somebody whose main form of exercise was lifting, I started to read, and play computer games, more. Those hobbies allowed me to prevent messing up my lifting process.

My interpretation of the law of diminishing returns is that there is an optimum amount of time/money to invest in any given situation, and after that the returns start to rapidly diminish. For me, three hours of lifting per week was about optimal. After that it’s not really worth it, more can actually start to hinder progress.

By creating these two vastly different goals – writing and cardiovascular fitness – I could focus on each individually without overthinking or overtraining. Most of the cycling and running was at “zone 2” intensity (easy running where holding a conversation is possible, cycling at a pace that could be maintained all day).

Writing, however, had been a tricky art to master. I could so easily do too much, set myself back and end up writing less than I otherwise would have, had I maintained a regular, controlled output. Having these running and cycling goals, which ate into my time considerably, allowed me to write clearly and regularly without the need for feast/famine cycles.

Having said all of that, I’m still not convinced by New Year’s Resolutions. Rather weekly, monthly and yearly goals. For 2018 I want to run 2,000 miles, cycle 5,000 miles, and continue what I have done with my writing (I may set a goal number of blog posts). I will also set intermediate running and cycling goals such as to PB certain distances but they’re not relevant for the purpose of this blog.

In summary, New Year can be a great motivator to inspire life changes but don’t wait for a date to change something you’re not happy with. I am locked in an ongoing battle with my teeth for custody of my finger nails. I’ll stop biting them tomorrow.