2012 New Year’s Resolutions!

As I mentioned on Sunday, there are a few goals I set for 2011 (and reached!) that I am going to keep for 2012. There are a few goals I made that I didn’t reach (womp womp) – and some of those I’m going to keep… but there are others I’m giving up on because they just aren’t that important to me. And then I have a few brand new goals that I’ve dreamed up to work on that whole “if you aren’t who you want to be, fix it” thing!

My list isn’t quite as long as last year (or at least it wasn’t when I first started writing this post – and then it just grew so now it’s 8 whole resolutions!), but all the goals I’m setting are ones that are important to me, and really live up to that mantra of be who you want to be, as well as my quote from yesterday about choosing to do what’s important.

Starting small, there are two major changes I want to make on a daily basis:

The first is one you’ve probably already noticed, given that it’s the third day in a row I’m getting a post out here: I want to make blogging part of my daily routine. I really enjoy blogging – putting my thoughts and opinions out there and hearing feedback from a lot of different perspectives. Lately, I’ve sometimes been discouraged from posting by not having a topic, or by feeling like I should talk about one topic, but not wanting to write about it that day. No more! I wasn’t ready to write about my New Year’s resolutions on Sunday, so I blogged about what I did want to write about, and stopped worrying about what I should be doing – and I realized that this is really what I should have been doing when I didn’t feel like writing a full race report, for example, and just stopped writing because I felt stuck on that task. I think with that and some other changes in my mentality, I can get back to blogging on a more regular basis.

Another daily task that I want to commit to is reconnecting with old friends. There are so many articles showing that Facebook and other social media can make us even more lonely because we start substituting online contact for human contact. Personally, I’ve noticed that I see status updates from old friends, so I kind of know what’s going on with them – but we don’t actually talk! Not good. And since I don’t browse Facebook much, there are plenty of people whose status updates I don’t even see, so I am really clueless. For 2012, I am committing to sending a personal email every day to someone that I haven’t talked to in a long time – updating them on what’s new in my life, inquiring about theirs, and (if they live locally), suggesting we make plans to catch up. I am really excited about this one!

Right now, I’d also like to add getting back to doing 100 pushups a day (seriously, it’s not that bad when you do it in sets of 10 and spread it out over 10 minutes of doing other stuff), but I don’t see this as one that I’ll want to keep up for the entire year. It’s just not that important to me in the long-term, so I’ll do it for now but am not going to worry about keeping it up forever. Being honest here!

Next, some medium-sized goals that I’m going to kind-of/sort-of measure monthly:

This break, I took two classes at Broadway Dance (yup, the studio featured in Center Stage, one of the best movies ever). On Monday, I took a musical theater class, and then on Tuesday, I opted for ballet. Most people from this blog just know me as a runner, but from when I was 4 to when I was 22, I never ran (except for the dreaded gym class mile), but took ballet pretty seriously – taking upwards of 10 classes a week by the time I was in middle school. I loved ballet with a passion, and wanted to be a professional ballet dancer until puberty intervened and I discovered I was gifted with boobs instead of a lean and flat dancer’s physique (and that no amount of classes, exercising, or diets could change that). Going back to ballet class was weird – I definitely felt like the fat girl in the class, but I chalk part of that up to not knowing what the latest is in dancewear to hold your girls in. I went through puberty fairly late, and also didn’t completely “fill in” until midway through college, so I hadn’t dealt with this problem before – surely there must be a solution? (Readers, please fill me in). But while I may not have felt as graceful, lithe, and (let’s admit it) smug as when I was the teeny slim star of the class at the age of 10, I still loved it now, and was surprised at how it all came back to me. In fact, at a Zumba toning class later in the week, the Zumba teacher asked me at the end if I had been a ballet dancer! I was very flattered 🙂 Now, this past year I made a goal of going to one dance/yoga class a month, but I realized that going once a month isn’t even what I’m really after. The updated version for this year: get back into dancing on a regular basis. I want to go to a class where I know the teacher and the other students, because it’s my “thing.” So I don’t have to go every week, but I have to go enough for “everyone to know my name.” That’s measurable, right?

Even if you think that last one is a bit nebulous, my other monthly goal is pretty darn measurable and black/white: to run a marathon a month. After a year of mostly taking a break from marathon running, I’m ready to get back into it – and I want to run at least one marathon a month this year. I know that the first one is going to be grueling, given how I haven’t really done a long run in a while, but hopefully I’ll get back in the groove soon and it will be smooth sailing from them on.

Finally, I have four big old goals that are going to take me all year to complete (but are going to be awesome when I do):

Hit a total of 400 unique beers on Untappd. Logging 200 uniques was a late addition to my goals for 2011 when I realized how close I was going to come (I was at 189 the week before New Year’s), so this year I want to double my total.. and also try to do it more in the form of tastings instead of full pours 🙂

Read 100 books. I just barely hit this mark last year, but I think 100 books was just the right amount to keep me reading but not stress me out. There are so many great books out there, and I’m excited to keep working my way through them!

Instead of the typical goal to lose weight, my goal is to keep my “traveling weight” hovering around where it is now. I’ve come to accept the fact that when I’m on the road, my weight is always going to be significantly higher than when I’m home and can cook healthy food… so I’m going to stop fighting reality and learn to accept that. I won’t allow myself to gain weight, but for my own sanity, I’m going to cut myself a break on trying to lose the vanity pounds, and just chalk them up as a job hazard. For the perks I get of traveling all over the world and doing interesting work, I’ll take it!

And finally, as I talked about yesterday, I want to develop a group of like-minded fitness friends this year – both to help me incorporate more fitness into my everyday life, and to potentially meet more “soulmate” friends. I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few of those over the years – friends who just get me and my thoughts, where I don’t need to explain yourself, and we just click. Creating a niche group of people who have the same goals and ideas of fun as me should be a great way to find more of that type of friend, and I’m excited about the possibilities!

So that’s it – my small, medium, and big goals for the year, and all of them very important to me. We’ll see if that breeds success!