2017 Achievement Board

If you have read my blog for more than a year, you've probably seen one of my past achievement boards. I started making them in 2013 as a way to help visualize my goals.

   

 

I started thinking about 2017 while I was walking the second half of the NYC marathon, as a way to distract myself from my misery. As I walked, I realized that during 2016 I made excuses that helped me to basically give up on myself. 

First, we were moving, and the hubs was working in NC during the week and home on weekends, so I was packing alone. We moved on Super Bowl Sunday. Then we were unpacking. And by we, I mean me. Because the hubs went right to work and helped me with the heavy lifting on the weekends. I barely ran again until March or April. I always had an excuse. 

When I was marathon training, I was so worried about injury that I basically ran, and that's it. No yoga or anything else, except a random workout here or there.

Let's talk about the food. I have been eating.all.the.food.

I haven't gained any weight, in fact I have lost some poundage, but I should weigh about 30 pounds less with all of the running, but if you cut me open and looked inside, I'm pretty sure I'm made of cake with chocolate in my veins. 

For real.

Every year I pick a word. It basically encompasses all of my goals. I try and get a shirt, bracelet, necklace, whatever I can find to go along with it. 

I decided that my goals for 2017 would have something to do with making improvements to my actions in 2016. Does that make sense? I have been running slower, not really working out, and my eating was crap. 

In addition to my usual goals, I added in that I needed to beat my best times of 2016 for each distance. 

I started thinking about a word to go along with this, and was throwing around improvement, inspired, motivated, and then I saw this:

 

Redemption.

I don't even remember what I was looking at. It just made sense to me. And so the planning begins. I looked at some more serious fonts, but I didn't want it to be depressing, so I went with the whimsical. I wanted to have a lot of spaces for my goals, as well. Once I meet a goal, I often add to it if there is still time left in the year. Once I lose five pounds, I'll make a space for ten. Complete a two minute plank? Let's go for three. And so on....

Once my goals are in place, it's time to make it permanent. I will hang this up in my office or my gym, where I will see it almost every day, to remind me of the goals I have met and those I still need to chase down. As I meet them, I color them in. I color in the corner squares right off the bat, so it's not so depressing. 

Since I am still recovering and won't start working out again until tomorrow, I had plenty of extra time this week to work on my training plan going forward. I may have actually planned out the next 11 months. Maybe.

I added some progressions to help me increase my speed, and included Ragnar training and Chicago marathon training. No worries, it's in erasable ink, so I can change it as I go. 

 I'm ready for 2017! Do you set goals each year? If you had to pick one word for 2017, what would it be?