We all hear about goal setting and planning events for our future targets.

With 2020 being the way it has so far, those goals have by majority, been quite disrupted.

The year has been a difficult time which needed some mental resilience to deal with cancelled events, and with that came a challenge which some of us have never had to face before.
Both as athletes and coaches, it's been a time for learning and dealing with adversity.

With winter fast approaching, we now have a period in time where we would normally be planning out our 2021 events and setting target on the events or races which really get us excited and drive motivation.
Well, we still had that last winter as covid hadn't happened at that point, so this now is the time where that thought process is really going into the unknown. We now have to plan and set goals for 2021 with a lot of uncertainty.

So what do we do, how do we plan ahead with no solid set in stone goals?

This is something I've been looking at closely over the year, using my own personal experience and even re evaluating how I've worked with my own goals.

For those of you who've had injury or illness, there are some similarities, especially if you only had one "A" goal and that was missed. In a sense this is similar, but the difference is before covid, we could still plan ahead of the injury stricken event and focus on the next one, still a difficult thing to do, but you still had an event to shift focus to and re start your preparation.

Before I go any further, let's talk about what a goal really is. For my athletes, I like to break it into three. So your main goals for each year are "A" events. Those are the key big moments, the ones which give you a buzz just thinking about them. Some may have only one of these per year, some maybe upto 3, perhaps 4, but not usually more than that.
Then we have "B" events, almost the big ones, but the excitement level is a little less, followed by "C" events. Quite often these are though of as training events. Results are unimportant, but they make for a great training exercise without any stress.

So back to the "A" goal, that's the one that gives purpose to everything you do in the sport. This is the one which gets us out there to train, when we think about it we can see ourselves in it, we can hear it, feel it, live it, what ever sense that gets firing, this is the one that counts.
When I say this is the one that gives purpose, I mean that as an end goal.

We then get into motivation. I hear athletes saying motivation is low, there are many times when I have low motivation to train, believe me, over the many years I was competing at a high level, the balance was more on the non motivated side than it was on high motivation. Some people can think of that as a bad thing, but motivation is an emotion, so of course you will have days when motivation is low, the best athletes in the world have many low motivation days.
Now how do we have a good workout when motivation is low, well without a goal, then there's no purpose behind that session, and before you know it, each session that follows becomes less important, days are skipped, mood gets worse, and we lose track of what we were even training for in the first place.

Now lets look at putting those goals in place, those using TrainingPeaks, putting them in your ATP has a nice layout which is right in front of you as a reminder. With your goals set out, suddenly you have purpose, the grim days have a reason for training. OK, you may not be motivated on a given day, but as soon as you think of that "A" goal, even with low motivation, I'll bet you'll kick your own ass and get the workout done. Once you're finished it, the satisfaction factor lifts the motivation and watch that come back up again in a few days if not tomorrow.

Hang on though, this is all perfect if we have a calendar with guaranteed dates in place. How do we do it without that luxury?

This is where we need to make a slight shift from event goals, and create goals which are non event based as well.
So of course, if you have events with dates on them for 2021, use them, they can still be big motivators.
What we can also use are goals a little more outside the box. This is something I've been doing myself this year. I used to be extremely event driven, that has changed since I stopped competing at a high level, and I have bene lucky enough to learn how to set a hybrid of goals which are event and target based.

So some outside the box ideas are, learning a skill which has been neglected. That might be improving your cadence by a given date. So lets say your FTP is 250watts, but your cadence is down at 80RPM, you know that's an area for improvement, but you havent really addressed it yet.
Set a goal on your ATP or on a calendar for 3 months and when you do your FTP test at that point, lets see if you can do the same values at or higher than 250 watts with a cadence of 90RPM. That may sound just like a normal training drill, but when you make it a goal, it takes on a new meaning and really has a purpose.
The fact that shift has been made which now makes it an "A" goal really can give it a whole new meaning. Of course we then need a reason for these slight shifts, so why are you increasing your cadence? For this imaginary person, the purpose is to improve efficiency over hilly terrain and hold fatigue back longer.
What does that do for their event based goal then, well it makes them perform better in the event itself, which is a bi product of the shifted goal.

Other non event based goals can be diet, improved sleep habit, improved family balance. Sleep is a good one, again use three months, lets say someone has been terrible on sleep habit, late nights, early mornings, and just hasn't bumped themselves into a better pattern.
So the goal can be to go to bed 15 minutes earlier each week until you hit the desired amount of sleep you know you need. The reason for that sleep change then needs to be a strong reason personal to you, maybe you're late for school/work each day and really need to change it before it leads to an unhealthy balance.

Whatever these slightly shifted goals end up being, they can all have a benefit, but the reason behind them needs to be strong.
The process leading into them is a journey, just like training for your "A" event. If its strong enough, the process of getting there has huge satisfaction. If you've ticked all the boxes on the journey there, then that's the reward at the end of the goal, get that right, and you'll be happy even without events.

Tags: Training, goal setting, motivation