My Goals For 2022
So this is easy blog fodder. It's a new year and everyone makes resolutions that are vague and easy to ignore but are awesome to write about how such-and-such is an inspiration and because of that you're going to climb Mount Everest with a kettle bell while going keto!
This is only sort of one of those posts. For my own benefit I'm going to lay out a bunch of my own goals, not resolutions, for 2022, why I want to meet those goals, and how I plan to accomplish them. Maybe this will be really basic for some people, but if anyone ever reads this, and they have problems seeing what the steps are to accomplish larger goals, maybe it'll help. Plus it crystallizes my plan in my head and makes me think about everything I think I want to do and decide if that's too much after all.
I'll break this up into a few sections, Fitness and Nutrition, Self-Improvement, and Lifestyle Changes. Fitness and Nutrition is separate from Self-Improvement because fitness is just a thing I do and the goals move around based on what aspect of fitness I want to focus on.
Away we go...
Fitness And Nutrition
Goal #1: Run a 5k in 25 minutes or less
So I want to do this because I've been lifting weights for almost 6 years now and the last few years I've moved away from caring about overall strength to things like work capacity and generally feeling well and capable. I still haven't addressed cardiovascular fitness to the level I really should and at the end of last November I took a little time to try out running and it turns out, I like trail running. Road running is a little boring, but not so weather dependant.
This is quite a shock to me as I was always one of those "I'll only run if someone is chasing me, hur hur" people, so finding out I get some level of pleasure from seeing myself get faster, have a lower heart rate during running segments, etc, is odd to me. I'm still getting over it.
So a 5k is about 3.1 miles and a reasonable pace for an okay-I-guess male runner is an 8-minute mile. If you do the math, that's just under 25 minutes to run a 5k. That's also a reasonable morning run for a cardio day. So this is a shorter way of saying I want to be able to run a sustained 8-minute mile for 3 miles.
I'm following a very simple None to Run Program which will, after 12 weeks (more or less), have me running a sustained 25 minutes. After that I'll just work on bringing my pace up if needed. I might just end the program where I want, but if not, there's all sorts of programming out there for running. This should be a very obtainable goal.
Goal #2: Maintain my Strength
With a focus on running, it would be easy to slack off on lifting and lose a lot of strength. This would be bad because I don't want to lose strength, but also being stronger helps protect joints while running and helps you run faster. The tangible goals here are that I want to keep the ability to do the following amount of weight for a single rep:
- Deadlift -- 340lbs
- Squat -- 265lbs
- Bench -- 175lbs
- Overhead Press -- 135lbs
The deadlift should have a star beside it, I'm still recovering on that one a little, but the others are lifts I can do right now. They're roughly 2x, 1.5x, 1x, and .75x body weight. I'm fine with these lifts going up, but I don't want them to go down. As such I'll be lifting 3 days a week, just like I'll be running 3 days a week. I'll be following lower stress programming to account for the extra fatigue generated by the running. If the lifts go down, it's not optimal, but I'll survive.
Goal #3: Maintain my Body Weight
I currently weigh somewhere between 170 and 175 pounds, depending on the day, what I've eaten recently, if it's a full moon, whether a black cat crossed my path, and many other variables. I feel really good at this weight. I like my options for clothes. I'm not carrying around a lot of extra weight for running. I'm happy where I'm at.
Maintaining this weight will be super easy because I've done it for about 2 years now. Adding running is the only variable here, I might have to eat more food to keep from going lower than this, but I track my macros anyhow, so it's easy to just shove a few more grams of carbs into the goal.
I use MyNetDiary these days to track all that. It's a slightly better UI than MyFitnessPal, and it doesn't crush my battery by having malware ads running in the app. This isn't helpful to anyone else, because you are a unique and wonderful snowflake, but I'm currently eating 200g of Protein, 320g of Carbs and 80g of Fat with additional goals of 40g of fiber and not more than 30g of saturated fat as part of my fat macros. I'll do a blog post on my nutrition later to explain all that. But it comes out to ~2800 calories a day depending on if you track the fiber as having calories or not.
Self-Improvement
Goal #1: Read More Books
I got out of the habit of reading books when I started working from home back in 2012 and so without a commute the number of books I've read since then is somewhat embarrassing. If I got a book to really grab me, I could still crush it, but books with boring bits became exiles to the Land of Unfinished Books.
So I'm going to set an easy goal of reading 1 book a month/1000 pages a month. This means I only have to read 30-35 pages a night, and I should be able to finish a book every month. This is a super easy goal and I want to actually read about double that and see if I can hit 20-25 books this year. I'll write a blog post later about the books in the list and probably write book reviews.
Goal #2: (Re)Start Learning Japanese
During my first retirement, I started learning japanese. I learned hirigana and katakana and some kanji and was working through various grammar elements using Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. I mostly just want to be able to sort of understand anime with the subtitles off and read some manga. I don't have any delusions of becoming a fluent speaker, I'm just not interested in the amount of work that would take.
So the goal here is to just work through Tae Kim's guide again for 1 hour a day, 3 times a week. By the end of the year that should be enough to have finished working through the guide, and I'll re-evaluate what my next steps are.
Goal #3: Blog Regularly
So I have a post brewing in my head of "Why did you start a blog in 2021" and I'll answer it more in depth there, but the short answer is that I like having a creative outlet. I used to write code and documentation for work and this fills some of that niche.
So the easy step here is, blog at least once a week. With book reviews, some basics about my training and nutrition, very occasional whiskey tastings, I should have enough content if keep my eyes open for other things of interest to talk about. I have no goal to build an audience, I'm doing all of this for me, not you, I just want to scratch the itch.
Goal #4: Shoot Regularly
Shooting is one of my hobbies and for a variety of reasons I haven't been out shooting much in the last few years. I like shooting, and I'd like to stay in practice, so in 2022 I'm going to make myself go shoot more. The goal here is to go target shooting or clay shooting once a month. I don't have any specifics on how many rounds I'm going to fire, but if I pack everything up and go somewhere to shoot, it'll be enough.
Lifestyle
This is sort of the miscellaneous section of things I just want to do. They're not fitness or nutrition and they're not helping me be a better person, they're just because.
Goal #1: Move out of California
Ooooookay, the why on this one will be its own separate post, but I need to get out of California and running various scenarios has narrowed the list of where I'll go to one of two states. Further socio-political issues have mostly canceled one of those states, but I'll leave the surprise for later.
Steps for this are long and arduous but begin, simply, with finding a house. I've reached out to an agent in the target state and I've got various filters with alerts for houses as they come on the market. I have a lot of requirements as I have to consolidate two households to one property, but finding a house that even looks correct is step #1.
Next the agent shows me around any houses that meet the on-paper requirements. If it still looks good I fly out to see the house, scope out the neighborhood, talk to the locals, etc. If that all checks out we put in an offer. If that goes well I get to go live out there and oversee any remodels, new structure builds, etc. Then I get to move two houses of stuff, multiple pets, and a wife with Celiac disease many thousands of miles away.
Good times, but it needs to be done. This goal supersedes all other goals.
Goal #2: Be Less Negative
Just kidding, this is one of those nebulous resolutions that can't be quantified.
In Conclusion
These are my main goals for 2022. I expect to do more things than this and fail to meet at least one of these goals. If, somehow, you are a person that is reading this, wants to ask me a question, and is also not a friend that already knows how to get ahold of me (how did you get here?), check out the About page for ways to do that.