less than one hundred and one

For a while now, I have known that I need to take some action to get myself fit again. I have always found it easier to stick to a training programme when I know that I am aiming towards a challenge. Exercising for it's own sake quickly gets old.

In a similar vein, now that the children are growing up, it is also time to start thinking about using vacation time for some more adventurous travelling and activities.

With these thoughts in mind, I started trying to draw up a list of goals. One of my contacts (from flickr and twitter and now blogger as well ) http://twitter.com/101ofawolf has set themselves a challenge to complete 101 goals in 1001 days. This type of challenge has been something of an Internet meme with various websites and chat forums. Over the last few days I have been trying to draw up a 101 list.

SMART is a handy mnemonic to help avoid pit falls when producing a list of this sort. Is the goal:

• Specific?
• Measurable?
• Aligned to a wider strategy?
• Realistic?
• Time-boxed?

The goals that I first came up with were specific and measurable and they were fairly well aligned to my vision of becoming fitter and of making the most of the precious holiday time. However the costs of a lot of travelling soon mounted up to make the combined list unrealistic. I also found it difficult to set deadlines to each of them. Life round here is way to chaotic to plan far in advance. This first list of goals was about 20 items long.

Some refining of the list saw the travelling thinned down. The fitness goal was split into a number of sub-goals and some additional goals around career and financial planning were added in. However another pit-fall opened up, a surprisingly large number of chores began to appear as goals. Now there is no doubt that I do need to sort out the guttering, lay a new bathroom floor and clear out the shed (and more and more) but these can't really count as being aligned to my greater strategy. I settled for consolidating all of these into a single goal of having a "maintenance plan" for the house.

All of these revisions left me with a list that I feel very positive about. Albeit this is still a long way short of the 101 mark. I have decided to keep the list open until we return from our holiday in Crete. I plan to blog more extensively about several of the items on the list in future posts but for now this is how the goals look:

1. Go cycling in Peru
2. Visit Rome
3. Travel around America
4. Travel around New Zealand
5. Visit Venice
6. Visit Corsica
7. Buy a new car
8. Get fit - beep test level 10
9. Get fit enough to run 10K in 45 minutes
10. Get fit enough to run 10K in under 40 minutes
11. Get fit enough to sprint 100M in 12 seconds
12. Get fit enough to cycle 40 miles in 2.25 hours
13. Get fit enough to cycle 40 miles in under 2 hours
14. Bring to an end my involvement in rugby coaching
15. Finish 2009 365 project
16. Edit my nanowrimo "Zen Looks Down" novel to a finished version
17. Write a Zen sequel
18. Send Zen novels to agents / publishers
19. Organise a charity event
20. Generate a maintenance plan for house
21. Keep the maintenance plan up to date and keep it decreasing
22. Ride one of the classic Tour de France mountains
23. Complete an Etape (Giro or Tour de France)
24. Complete an adventure race
25. Gain the Business Continuity qualification
26. Become self-employed
27. Buy a DSLR camera
28. Organise university funding for the children
29. Organise a "post college" fund for the children
30. Pension funding
31. Go white water rafting
32. Go for a hot air balloon ride
33. Smarten up my personal website
34. Take down the overgrown tree in the garden
35. Do some mountain biking on a "proper" mountain trail