Or, rather, re-revisited. In my last post, I wrote that I had given up some of my planned goals in order to preserve my mental health and to make running enjoyable again. It was a great decision! While I am somewhat of a quitter by nature, I don’t think this was one of those times when I gave up on something I should have pushed through, like when I DNFed the Twin Cities Marathon. I think giving up on my distance goals for the year preserved my long-term relationship with running and overall made me a happier person.

Even though I scratched a few of these goals, I’ll still go through the whole list.

1. Finish St. Paul, Mendota Heights, South St. Paul, and Lilydale; Get to 30% completion in my hometown of St. Louis Park.
   I completed all of these! Technically I have to go back and do another street in South St. Paul that was added after I got to 100%, but it was complete at one point! I will write more about my experience running St. Paul in a separate post. I passed 30% of SLP on Christmas Day (and then went back a couple more times because I thought my goal was 33%, not 30% – it made more sense!) and – spoiler alert – plan to complete it in 2022. I also completed Mendota, which is like 10 streets.
2. Complete a Myrtl routine at least 50% of the time.
   I blew through this goal, which I figured I would. I set the bar low just in case it took me longer to establish a routine. A few years ago my company set a performance metric that, by the time it was released (in late Q1!), was impossible to attain; we just didn’t have enough work to offset the hole we’d dug ourselves. I didn’t want to end up in that situation. It ended up being easy to remember to complete the routine, I just did it when I did my pushups, like I’d anticipated when I originally wrote about my goal. I ended up hitting an ~81% success rate! It really helped with the hip pain, too.
3. Do 110 pushups a day.
   I hit this goal after a furious effort in the last 5-6 weeks of the year. I did 200 pushups a day pretty much every day of December in order to make up for some missed days, but I made it! (Edit: I averaged 112.25 pushups/day, which was about 5 better than 2020!)
4. Increase my mileage 10% over last year.
   I ran less than 1600 1500 miles this year, my lowest total ever. (I was writing this from memory and went back to check after publishing. I ran 1485.35 miles, which is the lowest total in the 6 years I’ve been tracking – I guess not technically the lowest total ever, as there were years I didn’t run much or at all. Technically if you count walks, I made it over the 1500 mile mark.)
5. Buy a bike.
   I don’t know why this is so hard for me to accomplish, but yet again I have not done it. 2022 will be my year!
6. Run 5 more long runs than last year.
   I didn’t do too many long runs this year, and haven’t done one in months. Running streets for completion isn’t conducive to long runs, it turns out. I need to get back to trails!

I finished 50% of my goals, which isn’t great, but I get bumped up to 75% completion if I focus only on the goals I didn’t throw out halfway through the year, and that is pretty good! It’s a passing grade, at least, which counts for something in these crazy times.