Call it a resolution, plan, objective, or target. Call it your alarm clock or the incentive to get out there when it’s cold. Call it whatever makes you happy, but do yourself a favor and set at least one effective goal for 2008. My goal, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s read this newsletter over the past two years, is to earn my big belt buckle for finishing the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in less than 9 hours on August 10, 2008. Lance Armstrong’s goals for 2008 may be more surprising, but I’ll get to that later.

A goal can be a great foundation for providing motivation and defining your path through training and nutrition, but only if it’s specific. A loosely-worded “I want to lose weight” or “I want to climb faster” marks a poor beginning to a journey that’s likely to fail. To be effective, goals have to meet two requirements:

1. An effective goal includes measureable results.

Losing weight and climbing faster are good starts, but to make those goals effective, you have to add more detail. How much weight do you have to lose in order to succeed? How much faster do you have to climb, and are you measuring your improvement in time, sustainable power, or power-to-weight ratio? Those details give you concrete markers so you can objectively see if you’re succeeding.

In my experience, people who create vague goals have no real intention of following through with them, and it’s easier to let them fade away when they were difficult to define in the first place. Without specifics, it’s harder to say whether you’ve accomplished your goal or not, and perhaps it takes the edge off the pain that accompanies failure.

2. An effective goal has a deadline.

Even if you get to the point of saying you want to lose 10 pounds or climb your local mountain in 19 minutes instead of 20, there’s one more step to making your goals effective: give it a deadline. This is critically important because it has a tremendous impact on the kinds of training and nutritional strategies you’re going to use to get there. Are you going to lose 10 pounds by Memorial Day or Thanksgiving? Are you going to climb one minute faster by April 15 or August 1?

Lance Armstrong’s Athletic Goals for 2008

I’ll give you some examples of effective goals, straight from Lance Armstrong. He emailed his list about a week ago, and though he says he has two goals for 2008, I told him only one of them counts so far:

1. Run the New York City Marathon in 2:30:00 on November 2, 2008.

2. Complete an ultra-endurance cycling event.

Obviously, it’s the second one that doesn’t count yet because he hasn’t decided on a specific event. I’ll let you know when Lance decides exactly what he wants to do.

Now you know what we’re up to in 2008. What are you going to commit to?