Um, January? Hello?

How, exactly, is it February? It seems like just yesterday I was finishing up my lovely restful Christmas holidays and *poof* it’s February! This means, of course, that we are 1 full month into the new year and it seems like an excellent time to check in on those goals that I set for 2013, doesn’t it?

goal

First of all, since I actually set measurable physical activity goals, I’ve been using a spreadsheet to track my progress on those goals1. For my pushup and biking goals (1,300 pushups and 500 km of biking, respectively), I have divided by 12 to set my monthly goals, but for running, I set individual month goals based on how much running I need to do in each month to train for the 2 half marathons I’m planning to do this year. I didn’t actually set goals for yoga or hockey2, but I’m tracking those too. Turning to the spreadsheet, I can see that for January I completed:

  • 212% of my monthly goal for pushups (230 pushups)
  • 111% of my monthly goal for running (11 km)3
  • 59% of my monthly goal for biking (24.6 km)4
  • 370 minutes of hockey
  • 460 minutes of yoga

I’m also happy to report that I’ve kept up with my goal of doing some kind of physical activity every day for a year, which I started on Dec 30! Some days it’s just been a little bit – like 10 pushups – but the point is to not break the chain and sometimes that’s all I can fit in on a given day5. So far, I’ve been able to keep the chain intact!

I have not, however, knocked anything off the 101 list, including the item that I chose to focus on for January, which was “78. Clean up my boxes of papers!” However, I have friends who will be visiting later in the month who will be staying in the spare room, which will be just the impetus I need to actually clean up those boxes, as they currently reside in the spare room! In addition, it’s almost tax season, so I’ll have to go through all my papers anyway to find the stuff I need to take to my accountant.

Also, in order to keep up with the goal of knocking 13 items off my list, I need to pick an item to focus on for February6, so I’ve decided to pick item #52 – “cook a decent tasting eggplant parmesan.” Mmmm, eggplant parmesan!

Of course, all of this is well and good in a month where I don’t have my usual classes7, so we’ll have to see if I can keep it up throughout February!

  1. Thanks to Dr. Dan, who shared his physical activity tracking spreadsheet with me! (He actually shared it last year, but this year I’m actually using it to it’s fullest potential!) []
  2. My implicit goals for those are “go as often as I can given the yoga class schedule of whatever studio I currently have a Groupon for” and “go to every scheduled game that my school schedule allows me to go to,” respectively. []
  3. This is all thanks to Alicia, who invited me to go running with her on weekends when my schedule allows. She’s training for different races than I am, but we really like running together – it really helps motiviate me to get out there – so we are doing that when we can. []
  4. I’m not too worried about this being below my goal for the month. I usually ride the stationary bike in my building’s exercise room while reading for homework and since I’m not taking the modules from my program this month, I’ve not done as much reading as I normally would. I’m confident I’ll catch up once I get back to my regular school schedule in the middle of this month. []
  5. For this goal, I have to be realistic – I’m just too busy to do a big workout every day, but I can do a reasonable workout most days and make sure I do something else – like a few pushups – on the other days []
  6. Meaning I’ll have to do 2 items this month – my punishment for not getting an item done in January! []
  7. I have another class, but it’s stretched over 3 months instead of 2 weekends, so the intensity of the workload is much less! []

Comments |3|

Re: DanCancel

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Legend *) Required fields are marked
**) You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>