Planning and Goal Setting Part 3

I am happy that I'm feeling much better today. I do think I'm fighting a cold, and I had been taking Sudefed, which I think had me a little bit dehydrated. I think those two things combined made for a miserable run yesterday. Live and learn! Today was a scheduled day off for me, which was great.

Let's take the goal from yesterday's blog and see how we need to plan our training to accomplish it. The goal was "To swim 1000 yards,in a pool in under 20 minutes by June 2009." First, we need to identify what has kept us from accomplishing this goal in the past. Is it because we don't know how to swim or need to work on our technique, is it because we don't have the endurance we need, is it because our strength is lacking? Let's say the limiter in the past has been our strength. Next, we need design a training plan that specifically targets improving strength, while not neglecting other areas. The key here is not to just focus on improving strength and neglect other areas. See why it's important to identify this early . . . as building strength takes time and needs to be gradually improved as to avoid injury. Next, it would be time to design the actual training plan that is going to help us accomplish our goal. As that's a completely different topic, I'll talk about that some other time.