It’s that New Year resolution time again.
Here are mine:
Give up football. Probably.
Give up alcohol. Probably.
Keep on running.
Somehow maintain the will to live in view of the first two.
I’ve realised that I waste half my life watching, listening to, reading/writing/talking about, and listening to others talking about, the occasionally beautiful game. It’s way too much, and an obstacle to real life. The reason I say “probably” is that I think the decision should be as arbitrary as the game itself. My team, Queens Park Rangers, have two home games left before the new year. If we win them both, I’ll soldier on with the curse of obsession. If we don’t, I’ll give my season ticket away, and become a happier person.
I was thinking about this while running my 4 miles this evening. I’m going to offer a wager: bet against me. If we win the two games, you pay a sum of money to the UK Brain Tumour Society (I have to send in my final Chicago tally by the end of December). If we don’t, I give you my half-used season ticket. That’s the deal I’m going to offer on the QPR messageboards.
Alcohol? Yes, I think it’s time I shoved it to one side for a while.
And running? I’ve been thinking about what my 2003 goals should be. I’ll be doing quite a few half marathons and 10Ks, so I would expect to make some improvement here. It seems to me, as I’ve tried to plan the running year ahead, that there are two distinct competitive running seasons: Spring and Autumn. March/April, and to a lesser extent May, and then September/October and into November. Both are full of races I want to do. For this reason, I’m going to set some goals for Spring 2003, then see if I need to revise them for the later period.
Spring 2003 goals:
To do a 10K in less than 1 hour (=9:39 pace). Only previous 10K (hilly and hot) was 1:05, so getting in under an hour should be very do-able. Originally I though 50 minutes would be a good objective, but decided to take it one step at a time.
To do a Half Marathon in 2:11 (10 minute pace). I did 3 half marathons this year. All were around 2 hours 30. However, the second one was slow because I turned up late, after everyone had gone, and the third one was slow because a marshal sent me a mile in the wrong direction. I was on course for about 2:20 in that one, so 2:11 seems like a reasonable goal. Later in the year, I’d like to get this down to 2 hours, but I’ll see how the initial goal shapes up first.
I won’t set a marathon goal at this stage as I’m not planning to do one for around a year. If I was doing a Spring marathon I might be going for around 4:45, but I’ll defer this till I know when the next one will be.
