10,000 Steps a Day

I've been trying to keep my goal setting to a minimum. I've learned that until I can accept the goals I don't reach as an attempt and not a failure I need to keep the goals to obtainable ones.

Unfortunately/fortunately, one cannot change who they are overnight and goal setting is something that I do to push myself to do more and be better. 

I enjoy setting goals and I enjoy reaching goals. The thing I need help on is learning that it's okay to be proud of and to celebrate the goals I accomplish. 

Currently my goals are all fitness related and revolve around running and/or walking. 2014 is my year to reach 1250 miles in a year as well as to complete 14 half marathons. 2015 is my year to complete Tracy's Dose of Dopey (the Dopey Challenge, just in California and without the race experience, including cost). 2015 will also be my year to walk and/or run a total of 1702 miles, the distance from California to where my grandfather is buried in Missouri. Once this goal is achieved my mom and I will take a road trip to visit his gravesite as she has never seen his headstone in person. I may also be planning on focusing some time to increasing my intervals in 2015 in an attempt to break out of my comfort zone (and a PR may be attempted at some point for both my half and full times). 

The idea to walk 10,000 steps a day came about through a challenge at work. "Walktober" was our wellness departments idea to get people to be more active by either logging their steps or their minutes of activity per day. It involves teams and you earn leaves for each level of activity you do. 10,000 steps a day is the highest level you can reach, a gold leaf. 

That's where the goal began.. But it's not going to end there. I'm only 4 days into the month and really enjoying the extra push to get those steps in and I would like to continue to push myself past when the challenge ends. In fact, I would like to push myself to walk 10,000 steps a day for an entire year. 

Some days I may be under, some days I will go over. My hope is that when September 30th comes around I will have traveled a total of 3,650,000 steps. Seems crazy at this point, but it also seems kind of cool to go that many steps.

It helps to be in the middle of training and to have races signed up through June of next year. My 15 mile training run yesterday helped me go over 30,000 steps in one day. Not all days are going to be like that though, and it was a struggle the day before to get over 10,000, but I pushed myself to keep going to reach that goal and I reached it with 10,182 steps. 

For October I'm already at a total of 71,484 steps. It's pretty cool to see it add up and to see how far I can really go with this. 

I think goals are important in order to push yourself to do more. I also think there is no such thing as a goal that is too small or too big. As long as you are willing to put in the work to achieve it then there is nothing that can stop you.

So, tell me.. What are your goals? What are you working towards right now and how is it going? What do you need in order to obtain those goals?