Blog Goal

This blog contains more than 100,000 words. That’s a lot of writing! How do you go about tackling such a big project? You set intermediate goals and then set short-term goals to get you to those intermediate goals. You track your progress toward these shortterm goals, all the while reminding yourself of the long-term goal, and when necessary and appropriate, you review what you’ve done to remind yourself how far you’ve come. That’s the approach that I recommend for running as well. You need to set both shortterm and long-term goals, you need a way to track those goals, and you need to monitor how you’re progressing toward your goals, both to see whether they need to be revised and to remind yourself how far you’ve come.
For most runners, the ultimate long-term goal is to keep running for the rest of their lives. That’s a pretty heady goal, and one that’s hard to pin down. It’s certainly my ultimate goal, but it’s so vague that I can’t use it as my main source of motivation. I set goals for a given year, and then within that year I set intermediate goals of what to focus on for a few months at a time. Within those few months, I set even shorter-term goals to guide me through a week or so of running at a time. Along the way, I’m constantly assessing things to determine what adjustments I need to make.
Again, consider this blog. When I started to write it, I would have been lost if I would have said, “OK, I’m going to write more than 100,000 words about running. Let’s get going!” Instead, I looked at finishing each section as a goal unto itself and finishing each section of each chapter as an even more immediate goal. Along the way, I’d monitor how I was progressing. (Usually not as much as I’d like!) By plugging away like that, I was able to produce what you’re reading now. You probably take this approach with your work as well without even thinking about it.