2024 Goals
2023 was a very big year for me and I am very proud of what I was able to accomplish. I ran some great races of my own and I had the opportunity to go out to Moab, Utah and pace and crew for a friend of mine at the Moab 240.
I started the Spirit of Running as a YouTube channel and while I am not sure it had grown to the point of needing a website, here we are anyway. I finished out the year training and prepping for the Chevron Houston Marathon, and even though it was a 2024 race, I still count it as belonging to 2023.
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I am a big believer in goal setting. One can make the argument that they are the same thing and I guess in part they are, but for me goals tend to build on the foundation of previous work rather than simply popping out of the ether. So what are my goals for 2024?
1. Speed
I’m not the fastest runner, and I never plan to be. That being said, I do wanna work on running faster than I have before. My coach and I have decided to spend the first half of the year really focused on building strength and subsequently speed by focusing on full body strength and body composition in the gym, and by focusing on the 5k in my running. I love the ultra-running community and I think that my heart and personality belong with them, but I think that I can become a better ultra runner if I spend some time working on speed, so that I can have extra gears when I need them.
2. Body Composition
At the finish line of Ironman Texas 2021.
While this goal benefits my first, I am giving it its own position. Body composition definitely helps with speed. Currently I’m sitting in right around 260 lbs, and while I absolutely celebrate what this body can do, I find that I felt my best at a trimmer body composition. Will I ever be a runner under 200 lbs? I don’t think so. That may change someday, but to date the lightest I’ve been was about 209 and I looking back at photos, I’m not sure that I had much room to get smaller. The hard part for me is that whether i’m 260 or 209 or anywhere in between, when I look in the mirror I see the same body. I can look back on pictures from when I raced my Ironman in 2021 and see how much I was than I am now, but at the time, I couldn’t see it. Just as now I couldn’t see the difference when I went from 220 to 260. We are all on our own journey, but I want my journey to last as long as possible, and whether I drop 40 lbs or 15, I want to do what I can to make things a little easier on my body. That is why I give this goal it’s own section. I don’t want a body composition change to get faster, but I want a body composition change to feel better.
At the finish line of the We Run Houston 5k the day before the 2024 Chevron Houston Marathon.
My endurance coach also coaches boxing so one thing I am very excited about is adding boxing to my fitness routine. If you haven’t tried it, it’s incredibly fun and one heck of a workout.
3. Run a Marathon PR (I have a city in mind, but the registration isn’t locked in, so that’s tbd)
Going into Chevron this year, my Marathon PR was 5:45:57. I hoped to break that at Chevron and I hoped that I would break the 5 hour mark on a perfect day. While the weather conditions were pretty amazing, my body didn’t quite cooperate and I ran a bit slower than my PR, but I finished! I’m hoping that sometime in November or December with focus on the 5k in the spring, I can take that speed into a fall marathon and build a PR season. I’m hoping to run a race in November, but until that registration is completed, I don’t want to put something out in the universe that isn’t true, but keep your fingers crossed for me.