Keep It Real

To use goals to motivate you to run, start by setting short-term goals that you can achieve within three months. These goals should be specific and challenging, yet within your grasp. For example, your goal might be to be able to run three miles in less than 30 minutes at the end of three months.
To get to your short-term goal, you need to set shorter-term goals that follow a logical progression. After all, if you can now run two miles at a pace of 12 minutes per mile, and you keep doing that for the next 12 weeks, then you probably won’t achieve your goal of three miles in 30 minutes. You need to map out intermediate steps along the way to get you from your starting point to your goal. To continue my writing analogy, those shortterm steps are the sections within a chapter. The first section leads to the second section, which builds to the third section, and so on until a chapter is complete. Your intermediate goals should be two to three months away so that you can achieve several shorter-term goals. Two to three months is long enough for you to make some progress in your running and long enough to allow for the setbacks that all runners encounter occasionally. But it’s also a short enough period of time that you can stay focused on the goal.
Being specific with your goals is the best way to make sure that you can track your progress. “I’d like to run faster” or “I’d like to lose weight” are amorphous goals.
Three weeks into your running program, you’re probably running faster, and if you’ve lost a pound, then you’ve lost weight. So why continue? But if you say, “I want to run three miles in less than 30 minutes by the end of June,” or “I want to lose 10 pounds by the beginning of November,” then you have something quantifiable to go after. You can chart a course toward meeting that goal, you can monitor your progress as you near it, and you can definitively say whether you achieved it.