Rethink Your Running Identity: How to change your goal-setting game

How to change your goal-setting game

While runners are notorious for successfully, and often obsessively, setting goals, we are also renowned for letting the singular, repetitive focus of these goals drive us to boredom, burnout, and worst of all, injury. Sometimes, the key to successful goal setting is to change your goals entirely – rethinking who you are as a runner, and ideally, reinvigorating your love of running in the process. Are you stuck in a running rut? Here’s how to break free in 2018.

While runners are notorious for successfully – and often obsessively – setting goals, we are also renowned for letting the singular, repetitive focus of these goals drive us to boredom, burnout and worst of all, injury. Sometimes, the key to successful goal-setting is to change your goals entirely – rethinking who you are as a runner, and ideally, reinvigorating your love of running in the process. “The change in training focus is helpful on so many levels,” says Derrick Spafford, a Yarker, Ont.-based runner and coach who hasn’t taken a day off running since Christmas Day of 1989, and who credits his consistency to varied running interests that take him from track to road to trail and back again, as well as from running shoes to snow shoes depending on the season.

“I found myself wanting a new challenge,” Deborah Russell admits, after running her first marathon in 2005 and qualifying for Boston on her third try in 2008. “The same old road runs day in and day out just weren’t doing it for me.” Russell took her running identity off-road in order to make training fun again, hitting the trails around her Calgary home and the nearby Rocky Mountains with her brother and dog at her side, but in the process, she ended up becoming one of Western Canada’s premier female trail and ultrarunners. While Russell’s example may seem extreme, it points out what kind of passion and potential we may be missing out on by focusing on the same, myopic goals, year in and year out.

Are you a dedicated distance runner who needs to reboot her love of running shorter and faster? A diehard road racer who needs to take to the trails? A track-loving speed freak who’s ready to run long? Read on to pinpoint your own, specific running identity, and learn how a running rethink might be the key to this season’s greatest successes.