A New Year’s resolution does not necessarily mean you give something up, but instead you resolve to do something.  This could very well mean giving something up, for example, you could resolve to stop drinking.  Conversely you could resolve to do something, for example, run a marathon. I think of a New Year’s resolution as something I am either going to remove or add as long as it is to the betterment of my health.

For 2021 I have resolved to run 100,000 feet of vertical.  To put this into context, in 2020 I did 66,000 feet of vertical and in 2019 it was about 45,000.  Clearly this is a big jump but not so drastic that is not achievable, plus 100,000 has a nice ring to it.  100,000 feet of vertical breaks down to about 275 feet of climbing per day, 1,925 per week or 8,334 per month.  Oftentimes I will break it down at the end of each quarter and semi-annually as well.  I will then redo the computation at the conclusion of these periods to figure out what I need to do for the remainder of the year.

Setting a large goal and breaking it down into much smaller parts makes things much more manageable even when things go off track a bit.  I find I even  do this on a much smaller scale.  For example, if I am doing a workout or a race, I will do the calculations beforehand of where I need to be at certain points in the race or workout and when I get to those points I will figure out what I need to do from there.  This includes measuring things objectively (time, distance, pace, etc.) and subjectively (how my body feels).  Sometimes this involves changing the goal, hopefully to something more ambitious but often it seems like it means changing the goal to something a bit more conservative.  As you can imagine, this can be applied to almost anything in life, not just running or New Year’s resolutions.
Back to my goal of 100,000 feet of vertical in 2021, there are a few rules.  First, I will use Strava as my tool for tracking as I find this as a more accurate way to measure vertical compared to Garmin.  Second, treadmill running does not count towards my goal.  I run at a minimum of 1% grade on the treadmill but none of those vertical feet will count.  That is all for rules.  Wish me luck and feel free to follow my progress on Strava here.