Fitness tips: Goals

Over the next two months, I will share about 3 of my running clients who are training for races in the same weekend. I actually have 9 clients racing the same weekend and I will be running too. I am helping them in different ways, some are doing gym work with me, others I am also helping them with their actual plans. Today I will focus on goals.

I imagine that most people reading this will either work for a company or run a company. In which case I think you will have goals for yourself, your team and for the company. It is the same with training. If we don’t have goals we don’t know where we are heading. Like with business, they do need to be something that can be achievable and have a specific deadline. Sometimes it is just to be consistently training for health, but for others we set up some more specific goals so we know where we are headed.

Here are 3 clients with goals who we will follow over the next two months:

Meet Abigail

I have been working with Abigail for about a year and a half now. She initially came to me to work on her movement and strength after an injury to help with her marathons. She has had some bad luck with illness and the weather on race days so has still to make her time goal of 3:50 at the Amsterdam Marathon.

Meet Katie

Katie is a triathlete and came to me as previously she has found that strength training has really helped support her performances in triathlon. We have been working a short time on this and then she asked if I could also help write her programme for her first marathon. She is also running the Amsterdam Marathon and her goal is 3:30.

Meet Rodrigo

Rodrigo is doing his race the day before the Amsterdam Marathon. He has signed up for a backyard ultra. “The backyard ultra or last one standing is a form of ultramarathon race where competitors must consecutively run the distance of 6.706 kilometres (4.167 mi) in less than one hour. They must repeat this every hour until only one person completes a full lap – the last one standing.” When he asked me to help him, I confessed that I had never helped someone with something like this before but he insisted he wanted me to help. We have come up with ABC goals. A is like an out of this world goal, B is a realistic goal and C is a goal that you are happy with. His C goal is one lap more than a marathon, his B goal is 2 laps more than a marathon and his C goal is 75 km. We are mainly training for goal C so anything more than that will be done more mentally than physically.

As you can see, knowing the goals helps me plan their training. Let me know if you have some fitness/sporting goals for the coming weeks.