Charlie Custer

It’s a few days late for New Years resolutions, but now that we’ve finally gotten internet back after an outage that lasted seven days (thanks, Time Warner Cable), I want to take a quick look backwards and forwards.

2016

First, a look back at my goals for 2016.

Run 2,000 miles. This was always an ambitious goal, and I didn’t get all that close to it. At the final count, I ran 1,294.9 miles in 2016, so I got about 65 percent of the way there. Given that my training objectives changed several months into the year to focus more on climbing mountains, I’m pretty happy with this despite the fact that I didn’t reach the goal I set last January. Figuring a rough average pace of 10 mins/mile (I do a lot of long, slow runs), that works out to about nine full days of 2016 spent running.

Read 36 books. This was also an ambitious goal, and one I didn’t hit. I’m not sure how close I got (I know my count is missing a few, but I can’t recall which ones), but I don’t think it was far beyond 50 percent. Still, I’m very satisfied with how this one turned out. I read some things that were incredibly entertaining (The Stand) or inspiring (No Shortcuts to the Top), and one of these books (Eating Animals) made me change my eating habits for the better. I wrote about this at length back in August, and so far that change has stuck.

Write a 50,000 word novel. There’s really no way to avoid it: I totally failed on this one. I have about 15,000 words of a first draft that I lost interest in. I still believe this is something I’ll do someday, but I’m not sure that story will ever see print.

Take 2 online classes. Total fail. I did sign up for one U Chicago class on global warming that I could still finish, but I’m already weeks behind and anyway it’s now 2017, so that would hardly count. I did learn some new skills this year via the change in my work, particularly in terms of After Effects. But yeah, this one’s still a hard fail.

Summit Katahdin Done, along with Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, and a few other smaller peaks. Plus Bradbury Mountain like 300 times.

All in all, I’m fairly satisfied. Technically I only hit the mark on one of those goals, but several of the ones I missed nevertheless prompted the sorts of changes I was hoping for when I made them.

2017

Climb two big mountains, and do the Knife Edge on Katahdin. I’m not going to say summit, because getting down safely is more important than getting all the way up. But I definitely want to summit.

Eat one vegetable every day. I wanted a goal that would improve my diet at least somewhat, but I also wanted to avoid having to count calories or macros, which I realize is effective but which is also a time-consuming pain. Still, I needed something measurable, so here we are.

Cover 2,000 miles total. I’m going to keep the 2,000 goal, but since my training this year will include a lot more hiking (and last year included plenty I didn’t track), I’m going to aim for a combined running/hiking total this year.

Read 20 books. 36 was a good goal, but I’m thinking 20 is a goal I’m more likely to hit. Particularly if I pick my books better so that the list doesn’t include epics like the extended version of The Stand (which I loved, but it was was very long).

Take Lily on her first camping trip. Gotta start ’em early.