What my half marathon training taught me about working towards long term goals.
As the year comes to a close, it’s a great time to look back on what we’ve achieved, and think about what we’d like to focus on for the year ahead.
In this article I’d like to share something that happened this year, and how it impacted my thoughts about creating sustainable goals for the year ahead.
When I was younger, keeping fit came naturally, I was regularly out in the mountains and exercising wasn’t something I thought much about.
Now, I love animation but it has to be said that it’s not the most active of careers. Over the past few years, I began to realise that I was getting outdoors far less and my fitness was suffering.
This year, in an attempt to reverse that trend, I set myself the challenge of completing a half marathon.
Setting out on my first run, I quickly realised that I was in worse shape than I thought. Simply running to the end of the road had me out of breath and I was not enjoying myself at all.
Things didn’t seem to improve over the weeks that followed. I was hoping for a moment when it would all become easier and I’d suddenly find running pleasurable but, no matter what I tried, the moment never came.
Despite not really enjoying the process, I don’t like to be defeated by things, so, over the months that followed, I stuck to my plan.
The distances I was running increased gradually until one day in the late Summer when I was out on the longest run I’d yet attempted, all of a sudden, everything seemed to click into place. The run not only felt easy but, dare I say it, even enjoyable.
Finally, I’d cracked it!
Sadly, over the weeks that followed, it became apparent that it wasn’t so easy. There were runs which went better than others, but I only rarely managed to recapture that same magical feeling.
Still, I was making good progress and was on track to complete the half marathon in the Autumn.
Then, everything changed.
When I was running I started to suffer from pains in my knee and ankle. As time went on, the problems became worse and it took longer to recover between runs.
Whilst I tried to keep going, as the date of the event approached, I knew that I had a choice to make.
I felt confident that, if I entered the race, I’d be able to complete it but, I knew there was a very real risk of injury. Alternatively, I could sign up for a different event in the Spring, giving me time to recover before continuing my training.
There was a big part of me that wanted to just power through and complete the race, the goal I’d set out earlier in the year. I simply didn’t want to fail.
But, as I thought about it, I realised that my original goal hadn’t actually been to complete a half marathon at all. Instead, I’d wanted to get fit and build an exercise routine which would allow me to stay fit. The half marathon was simply a challenge I’d come up with in order to focus my training.
Along the way, I’d lost sight of the true destination as I focussed on the short term goal.
Suddenly, the decision became easy. Risking injury was not an option. It would prevent me from achieving my true goal of making lasting changes to my fitness.
I booked a place on a half marathon in the Spring and, after a couple of weeks of rest, resumed my training at a lower intensity.
As I came to this conclusion, there were a number of things which occurred to me.
First of all, I was able to reflect on how far I’d come over the course of the year. When I started my training, it was hard to run any distance at all and I could see no meaningful change from one day to the next. It was only when viewed over a period of months that the progress became apparent.
When it doesn’t feel as though you’re making progress, taking time to look back at where you’ve come from makes all the difference. Something which can really help with this is keeping records.
For every run, I recorded the distance and time. When I finished a run and it felt like a struggle I could look back at past efforts. Often I’d discover that I’d run faster than previous occasions, helping with that feeling of progress even when, in the moment, it felt as though I wasn’t improving.
Clearly, it was only by sticking with the difficult thing and maintaining a consistent routine that I was able to make progress at all.
Obviously, willpower plays a significant part here but something that really helped me was having the challenge of the half marathon.
Without the deadline of race day, it would have been far easier to skip runs on days when the weather was bad or I simply didn’t feel like going out. The problem is, as soon as you start to break the routine, it becomes far harder to maintain.
The deadline is what really kept me on track.
Finally, I realised just how important it is to constantly re-assess our goals. Are they still relevant, and are they helping us achieve the bigger things we’re working towards?
If I’d stayed fixated upon the original deadline I’d set, I risked injuring myself which in turn would have prevented me from making lasting changes to my fitness.
Whilst I may not have completed the half marathon, I’m ending the year far fitter than I started it, with a regular exercise routine which will help me to maintain that fitness for the long term. That was the true goal which I almost lost sight of.
Whatever your goals might be for the year ahead, I hope there’s something to take away from my experience. If you’d like more specific advice for setting animation related goals, I've created a detailed framework for setting long term goals which I think will really help.
