2024 Goals

This is the Cycling Over 60 podcast, season two, episode 22,. 2024 goals. I'm your host, tom Butler. Of course, it is a busy time of year so I don't have an interview this week. I'm just doing a short episode on goals for next year.

First, a comment on goals. I have always heard that successful people write down their goals, but when I look for evidence of this, it's hard to find. I can find stories of people like Jim Carrey and Bruce Lee who are used as examples of people who wrote something down and then they achieve success. However, I think that could be a bit of cherry picking. I also see all over the place that people are 42% more likely to reach a goal if they write it down, but that is based on a study of 267 participants, so I'm not sure that that is a great sample size. However, it isn't much work to write down my goals, so I'm going to do it and, for added power, I will be posting them on my wall. That will maybe bump it up to 50% more likely that I'll achieve them. I do think that goals need to be measurable. A goal like wanting to write more isn't a good goal in my mind, unless I quantify what writing more means I have three sets of goals. I have health goals, cycling goals and podcasting goals.

For my 2024 health goals, the biggest thing is weight loss. I am currently around 207 pounds, but my goal for 2019 is to get down to 195. As a reminder, I don't see weight as a significant health issue. However, I believe my health habits over the years have led to excess fat in my liver, so I believe I'm going to have to be really lean for the rest of my life if I want to reverse the damage I have done. It is possible that I could find another way of monitoring liver fat, and weight would then become less of a factor. For now, it is my best way to estimate my progress. Of course, it is very important that, as I am losing weight, I am hanging on to as much lean muscle as possible. I think climbing rides helps with that. However, I think I also need to be much better with lifting weights. For now, I'm going to set a goal to hit the gym twice a week. I see this as doable, while three times a week would be better. I am being realistic. One health goal that is changing for me is blood glucose monitoring. This is my last week with the continuous glucose monitor. As I have said, it has been extremely valuable for me. However, I'm going to be looking for a way to monitor my insulin levels next year. That will give me a much better idea about how my body is functioning at the metabolic level. I hope to have the first look at fasting insulin in a couple of weeks, so right now I really don't have an idea about what to set as a goal. Eating insulin under 12 microunits per milliliter is considered normal, so for now, I'll be shooting for that.

As far as cycling goals are concerned, I was very happy with 2023 in that I achieved my primary goal of writing the Cascade Bicycle Club Seattle to Portland event. That was really big for me. In 2024, my main goal is to ride across Washington state. Again, that will be a big accomplishment for me and, to be honest, one that I'm not 100% sure to make. 400 miles that I need to go for the trip is a big distance for me. I do have some training goals to help me get there In 2023, I did 110 rides, spending about 192 hours on the bike.

I did 2,464 miles with 58,474 feet elevation gain. I think that the only one of those stats that I will really focus on is the number of miles. I want to target an average of 10 miles a day or 70 miles a week. If I can successfully do that, I will do better than my 20-23 miles by 1,186 miles to give me 3,650 miles for next year. That seems like a really straightforward goal. I want to do significantly more climbing in 2024. The month with the most climbing in 2023 was September. I did 10,571 feet of climbing that month. If I would target 10,000 feet a month of climbing for 2024, I would be at 120,000 for the year. That seems like maybe too big of a step up. I think I will make 100,000 feet my goal. I should be doing close to 21,000 feet in one week on US bike route 20 across the state. So a monthly goal of around 7,000 feet of climbing the rest of the year should get me to that 100,000 feet goal.

It is a little harder to set measurable goals for the podcast. Of course I want to get one podcast out a week. That has been fairly easy to do. One goal is to have more podcasts while at a location that would give me a chance to interact real time with other cyclists. I might try to do that four times next year, but I would love to hear from listeners if that is something you would enjoy. I have tried recording with a mobile setup in the past, but I'm still working on how to make it better quality. We'll just have to see how that goes.

I would also like to have more authors on. Like Tom Babin from last episode, authors usually do quite a bit of research as part of the writing process. I think that makes the interviews really valuable. I don't have a lot of connections with authors, so it makes it a little bit difficult to get interviews scheduled, but that is something good to figure out. Along those same lines, I would like to bring on people from other podcasts and I want to keep introducing you to people that I meet along the way. I have a number of very interesting stories to share in the form of talking to people about their personal journey.

One thing I would like to figure out is how to do a few more complex productions next year, something that is more engaging from an audio perspective. I will be experimenting with this, but I will need you to let me know if the experiments are successful or not. Well, that is a wrap on 2023 and setting the stage for 2024. I hope you've had some fantastic cycling experiences this year. Reach out by email or Instagram and let me know some of the achievements you've had. You can find both links in the show notes. Keep up the pedaling and remember age is just a gear change.