It happens to all of us at one time or another, we intend to take on a new challenge, and we just plain fail to tackle it. We often have the best of intentions, so what keeps us from reaching our goals? In this article, we hope to help you form better running goals so you set yourself up for success come race day!
SMART Running Goals
The reason we don’t reach many of our goals is because we are not specific enough when we come up with them. Running your first half marathon is a great goal to have, but without a plan to get there you may be “planning to fail” as the old saying says.
Depending on your career path, you may have heard of SMART goals before. They tend to sound a little boring when used in a professional sense, however; they’re great to use when designing our own personal goals.
If you’re unfamiliar with SMART goals, SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time based
How to use SMART goals when running
So for example, if your goal is to run more, you need to make the goal as specific as possible to make it achievable. If you don’t have a clear idea of what your goal means, how will you know how to make it happen? How can you celebrate it happening if you don’t know when it does happen?
Let’s break down our example with a goal to run more:
Be specific – Do you intend to run farther? Longer? More days per week?
Measurable- Running more days per week is definitely easy to determine. If on average you run three days per week, why not aim for 4 or 5?
Achievable- Having big goals is awesome. Be realistic with yourself though. If you’ve never run a day in your life, running the half marathon next week might be out of reach for now, but it is a great goal to have in the future.
Relevant –How excited are you at the thought of achieving this goal? What is relevant to you may not be relevant to someone else. The more personal the goal, the more it will mean to you upon achieving it.
Time–based – When do you hope to achieve this goal? Put it on your calendar or use a Countdown app to help you stay motivated.
Not sure what goals you should have to ensure you have a successful race day? Check out our race training guides at SpiritOfSurvival.com/Training.
Disclaimer
The Spirit of Survival website does not provide specific fitness advice for individual cases. Spirit of Survival does not endorse any services or products obtained through information provided on this site, articles on the site or any links on this site.
Use of the information obtained by the Spirit of Survival website does not replace medical advice given by a qualified medical provider to meet the medical needs of our readers or others.
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