Counting down . . . three two one! This is #3

Made it through the VERY stressful end of fiscal year where we spend all the money by midnight on September 30th. Long night and two days later I'm still destressing and recovering. The weather is miserable, rainy, cloudy, dank and dreary . . . typical europe! So Monday is D-Day in the war and with the help of Graeme Street and Josh via Cyclo-club and with the cyclo-core training programs I will hit the beach!

However, I need to state publicly my goals, the plan and the strategy to overcome resistance. I wish I had a little Borg from Star Trek which could jump in and say "Resistance is futile" whenever a distractor pops up to try to block my progress. But I'm the Borg . . . anyway this post will go over my GOALS.

I already mentioned I want to loose a certain amount of weight and I've calculated that to be 10 pounds per month. That's the first and immediate goal. I'm NOT thinking about overall how much to lose or things like that, just 10 pounds per month. So that's the weight part of the goals. Then there's the issue of my back and overall strength. My goal is to increase my flexibility and every month to make more progress on completing the Cyclo-core training workouts and on being more flexible with a stronger core to help eliminate my back pain.

That wasn't so bad and they are reasonable, measurable goals for short term success and to gauge my improvement. Longer term goals are harder because you want to be realistic. Not being terribly realistic myself I needed to scale back my ambitions for right now. I won't be getting back on the track and planning on Masters World Track Championships next fall. I won't be racing in the Senior 2s here in Europe. What I can do is finish the longer route of Nove Colli in May in under the time it took me to do the shorter route two years ago. The the ultimate goal is to complete the challenge for the Club des Cingles Mont Ventoux by climbing the basic three routes to the top in the same day. This is a challenge for any cyclist but especially for a big guy like me.

Now I have short and long term goals. I may throw some fun events in along the way but this is the plan. You notice I left out nutrition? I haven't talked about that because that's not a goal but a segment of my lifestyle change that will morph along with me. But keeping it basic I figure I need to eat lots of complex carb vegetables, fruit and lean meat. Stay away from processed food, fast food, simple carbs and the other easy stuff.

I'll go into this more in post #2 on the countdown to D-Day where I'll discuss the specific PLAN to achieve these goals. Thanks for reading!