As a great follow up to my last post about NOT completing goals and workouts, I opened up my Strava account to find this waiting for me:

Yay, me!  I knew I was close to making the year’s mileage goal – but I hadn’t realized that I’d already met it.  And with another month or so of riding in 2016.  🙂

As I look at this very simple graph, I realized something: we often set goals that are within our reference point.  (Last January, I thought 1,000 was great.)  Ok, so that sentence didn’t come out as smooth as I would like it – I see it as a factor of: we don’t always know how awesome we can be, because we see any improvement as great.  We’re the ones that hold ourselves back.

See, I thought that 2,000 miles in a year was awesome.  But looking at this today, sure, I could have set the goal at 2,500 and likely accomplished it.  3,000 would have been a push – and I would have just had to pile on more miles earlier in the year (and possibly not have 2 surgeries back to back).

I’ll accept this baby step and insight into my goal setting, because often I can accomplish more than I think I can – I just have to trust myself.

Now… what to choose as my 2017 mileage goal?….