Lake-side thoughts: Goals Should Work for Us

Day 5 … Fourteen weeks and counting. On the first Sunday in October, I will compete in the Half Full Triathlon. Trouble is my regular training program doesn’t fit especially since where I am for the next month doesn’t give me the flexibility to follow the plan. So, my quandary is how to modify my training. I poured over training programs from the web (and found two good tri-training sites trinewbies.com and amateurendurance.com), read all sorts of blogs and commentaries, looked over my tried-and-true plan and pondered.  

Then I came across Steve Jonas’s article in Spring 2008 USA Triathlon Life “Setting Goals to Suit”. Steve is my triathlon guru who wrote Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals. The closing thought in the article gave me my answer. With this I set a month-long training program to focus on 3 things: building endurance to help my body tap new energy levels; improving key functional skills; and regeneration.

The closing thought was “Goals should be there to work for us. We shouldn’t be there to work for the goals.”