From the archives - Episode I: 12 years a goal

I wouldn't call myself a hoarder, but I do tend to hang on to things for a while. This occasionally results in great joy when I come across a nugget of the past that had completely vanished from my memory. When this happens, it also reaffirms my faulty rationale for saving the stuff in the first place. "That was fun," I'll say. "Now I'm going to save every note I take for the next year so I can have fun again some day." One recent example: I came across a 'To-Do' list from the summer before I started high school. The list went as follows:

1. Rotate wheels on roller blades
2. Fantasy football draft list
3. Legos (set up fort)
4. Take a look at Wild Card race
5. Make changes to Hardball (a video game, in case you were wondering)
6. Organize mini football helmets

Those were pretty exciting times. This past week, I went through all of my old running papers in an effort to trim out the excess and create a binder of training plans and articles. While doing this, I found a piece of paper on which I'd scribbled responses to my college coach's questionnaire on our goals for that season and beyond. I want to share those here for a couple of reasons: (1) It's amusing to look at my 22-year-old self from my 34-year-old perspective, and (2) some of these are still relevant today.

To set the stage, this was January of my senior year of college (2003), and the indoor track season was in its early days. I'd just come off a cross country season in which I'd hurt my knee in a fall during the first race of the year and spent the next three months cross-training in an effort to get back for the post-season races. I'd managed to squeeze into the NCAA XC meet but was still injured starting the indoor season and quite uncertain about how my college track career would end. With that in mind, here's what I wrote:

Running Goals

Season:  

       (1) To run in a race by the end of the year

       (2) If able to run, then score points at the New England meet 

Year: By spring, run an 800-meter PR

Life: Continue to run in order to stay in shape and be competitive until I am an old man

How I am working toward these goals: Trying to overcome injury through PT and cross training; staying focused and motivated

What I can do better: If I didn't care about the other parts of my life, I would totally devote myself to running

What about past training has helped: I'm not sure. Has anything helped me, or has it just caused me to become injured?

What new training have you added: Plyometrics and box jumps; more speed for mid-distance training

Why I run: Because I enjoy feeling good about my fitness level, and I would die without the competition 

I am happy to report to the 22-year-old me that I am still trying to be competitive and still feel like I would die without the competition. (I also ended up having the best running season of my life, clearly because of these provocative goals.) It was actually eye-opening to realize that I had the same competitive fire then that I have now. I hadn't really remembered feeling so intensely motivated by competition. And I continue to wish that I could "totally devote myself to running," but that darn pesky life always gets in the way.

Thanks for joining me for this trip down memory lane. I will periodically post some more of these types of updates that are of no general interest. But what's the point of a blog if not to self-indulge?