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2019 Cycling Goals Worksheet

Cycling-Goals-blog

2019 Cycling Goals Worksheet

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1 Month down into 2019! How are you going with your New Years resolutions? This year is already full steam ahead & like many, you might be wondering where January went?!

We’ve got something here that can help, a simple worksheet here for you to help get those goal ideas out of your “idea/wishlist” onto paper. Then stick that piece of paper up on your wall, next to your bedside table, or somewhere where you’ll see it every day

What to do:

  1. Download Goals Worksheet
  2. Fill out
  3. Print final copy
  4. Stick it up somewhere you’ll see every day to reinforce your goals & milestones towards those goals

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Info about the Goals Sheet:

Short Term:

Short term goals should be focused on the next month or so and be realistic and achievable. A good example would be to set a time up a local climb or around a local trail and focus our training towards achieving it. This doesn’t mean that every time you go up the climb or around the trail that you try and set a personal best. Instead, set yourself a date and structure it into your program and in the short term focus your work towards achieving it.

The key with short term goals is to make them achievable; I believe that success breeds success and so by completing the short term goals your motivation will be enhanced and become stronger and stronger. Your short term goals should also be set with a mind to your medium and long term goals. By this I mean try and set goals that develop skills/fitness which will then on-flow into your next set of medium term goals.

For instance your short term goal may have been to achieve a new personal best on a local climb, and then your next set of goals might include a hilly race where this new found climbing speed could be put to use. It’s important at this stage to also be 100% realistic about your longer term goals – for example if you are looking towards a medium or long term goal of doing a sub-five hour marathon race in super hilly terrain but you weigh in at 100kg, then you might not be giving yourself a realistic chance of achieving that goal. If the race is in flat terrain, however, then a sub-five hour time might within the realms of possibility.

Mid Term:

Medium term goals can be considered within a six months to a year-long period and, as I outlined above, be a continuation of the skills and work we have done to achieve our short term goals. Again, to continue with the example above, a medium term goal could be to complete a sub-five hour marathon race.

However, it’s an important aspect of medium term goal setting that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. When establishing your year’s plans consider that there will be a peak period in the year when you might be in your best physical condition – with this in mind I would look to establish several races around the main goal race that you could also compete in. This method enables us to use our fitness and condition fully and if something goes wrong in our goal race or event it enables a fall back plan and another chance to succeed. This is often where athletes go wrong – focussing on just one event in a year can doom us to failure. A puncture, mechanical or health problem can always arise, leaving you feeling like all that training was for nothing. This inevitably leads to de-motivation and lack of interest.

If, however, we have another race in a couple of weeks we can refocus our strength and go and smash it. Of course there is also the opposite side of the coin. Giving yourself too many races can mean you lose focus altogether. I generally advise two peak periods each year for my athletes, with each of these periods lasting four-six weeks at a time. Racing every week can, and often does, lead to a “jack of all, master of none” type of riding. It is very difficult to have the highest level of arousal for a special race when we have been racing every week for the past six months.

Long Term:

Long term goals are those things we would love to achieve as our ultimate goal. You often hear the most successful athletes in the world talk about how they had dreamt of representing their country at the Olympics, or always knew they would win the gold medal from when they were children. Again the goal should be realistic and achievable – for example, you might want to top ten in your age category one day. These long term goals inevitably drive us onwards after the shorter and medium term goals have been achieved for the year and add to the continuity from year to year.

By establishing our long term goals we can begin the overall process and bring all our other goals into line to help us step by step towards it. Goal setting is such a priority in my eyes that it’s the first thing I get my athletes to consider before anything else. It is so important and vital to the process of overall fitness development and improvement, and without establishing our goals it’s so easy for our motivation to lapse, leaving us to fail and meander along without a specific focus.

Interested about motivation, what goes behind just setting the goals?

Check out our ‘Motivated Thinking‘ article here.

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Time left for the rest of 2019:

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