New Year's Resolutions

New year’s resolutions

I currently only run around 30-40 miles a week. I’d prefer to be running 50-70; that would be the mileage at which I’d know for sure that I’m taking my running aspirations seriously. Because of this, I love to sneak in an unplanned medium-long run on holidays to pretend that I’m inching closer to my “ideal” weekly mileage. This temporary boost doesn’t really help me out in the long run.* But running around the neighborhood when I have a free 1-2 hour slot is something I also just enjoy anyways.

The most recent holiday happened to be New Year’s and, when looping around Prospect Park a little too quickly and enjoying the freedom of an unstructured day, it was obvious that there were a lot more joggers than usual outside. I’m hoping that most of these other people were taking advantage to enjoy the day off. But I couldn’t help wonder about how many were there as part of a New Year’s resolution.

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. There are a ton of reasons why they don’t work for most people and most of these reasons seem fairly obvious. The development of a resolution coincides with an arbitrary external event that has nothing to do with your intrinsic habits or self-defined goals. In effect, the turn of the New Year just ends up being a neglected alarm clock. You wake up for a brief moment only to hit the snooze button on your newfound resolutions – why would it be any different? It sounds harsh, but trying to wake up with the help of an alarm is a lot different from actually waking up because there’s something you want to do.

Having said that, I thought that the coming of the new year would be a good opportunity to think about my current goals and reflect on how I’ve decided whether or not those goals were meaningful.

Good goals

Beyond the idea that goals should have natural continuity and constant purpose – rather than be directly attached to the wake-up call of 2019 – I believe in a few other defining characteristics that make up a good goal. In light of the most common resolutions, I’ll occasionally use losing weight (a bad goal) and exercising more (a slightly better goal) to also explain certain characteristics of bad goals (in my eyes). For myself, in order of increasing importance, I’ve found that my good goals…

• Have concrete achievability and measurable progress
• Allow for complete self accountability
• Trace back to a genuinely innate and meaningful wish

Have concrete achievability and measurable progress

My best goals have been ones that were easily tracked with quantitative feedback. Especially with running, I can easily log my weekly / daily mileage and workout type with a watch and phone. With a time trial, I know exactly what kind of racing shape I’m in.

In terms of losing weight and exercising more, some easy adjustments that most people already make are specifying how many pounds to lose or how often they’ll go to the gym.

Allow for complete self accountability

Exercising more is a much better goal than losing weight because losing weight is not an immediate individual choice. It’s a bummer to work hard and not see a dip on the scale, but that particular disappointment on the scale is external; it’s not as strong as self-disappointment when you miss a workout or give in and binge on junk food.

In terms of running, I’ve found that the self-accountability of a goal helps to keep things in perspective and to avoid discouragement when not hitting the times that I want to for a particular distance. Although I can’t force myself to run a certain time, I am in control of whether I stick to my routine of 4 days easy + 1 day workout + 1 day long run. If I miss something then it’s my own fault. Having that level of accountability for my own actions makes it much easier to stick to the goal plan even if the desired outcome of a particular race time isn’t guaranteed.

Trace back to a genuinely innate and meaningful wish

My main gripe with goals that involve specific aspects of losing weight or exercising more is that they don’t address the fundamental nature of a goal: to help find happiness and/or meaning, either directly or indirectly. A great question is, will I be happier if I’m 10 pounds lighter? Or spend an hour at the gym three times a week? Or any variant of the question?

Personally, I’ve found that the lack of purpose stemming from these kinds of commitments to be relatively off-putting; I’ve had similar goals before. For myself, I found that while these goals are achievable, they aren’t effective because they don’t tie directly into something that I actually want. I’ve been 10 pounds lighter, but it was hard to maintain because it wasn’t actually helping me run faster or play soccer better which would have actually made me happy. In the end, my actual happiness was irrelevant to my weight – it turns out I just wanted to be in a good enough shape to do certain things I enjoy.

Similarly, the example of going to the gym a certain number of times a week becomes a chore and not an investment. A chore is something that can be completed half-heartedly; an investment is something that is voluntarily given full commitment. As an example, in a recent trip to the weight room, another regular gym goer remarked that he and I were the only two people at the moment not spending most of our time in the gym sitting on equipment and just watching videos or browsing social media. His observation actually surprised me – it’s something I hadn’t noticed before but made me realize the different natures of people’s gym habits. I’ve always thought that the point of exercising was an intrinsic desire to lift X, run Y, or be able to do some other physical activity Z, but it reminded me that some people go there because they’re just supposed to, because merely being in the gym means that they’re working towards being in shape, and that’s not a particularly healthy or sustainable attitude.

In the end, I’ve found it helpful to classify what I want as either a means to an end, an actual end, or a consequence of the means. If my end goal is to make sure that I can go on weekend long runs, explore biking and hiking trails, or dominate a game of pickup soccer with friends without needing to catch my breath, then my means to that end are to make sure I have enough cardio and strength to enjoy those activities. Losing weight is a consequences of the means to that end but has no bearing on what I want or what I need to do.

A concession

I do have a few goals that are in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions. They were already in progress regardless of the fact that we’re in 2019, as they should. Some of these include:

• Hitting 2000 miles running this year: I was close in 2017 with just over 1900 miles and a bit worse in 2018 with 1600 miles
• Building something in a new programming language: I’m almost at the point where I can write idiomatic Python but I’d love to also pick up a lower-level systems language
• Writing at least one a month and across a wider range of subjects: my Trello board is full of small jots and ideas that are waiting to be turned into a blog post but I’ve been dragging my feet to actually get them posted, including a ton of reflections and thought pieces like this one. I’m expecting my output efficiency and quality to increase as I write more and more

*No pun intended