Reverse Goals

I was explaining to a friend recently about my new goals for the handful of races I’ve allowed myself to sign up for in the last few months. I am making reverse goals. That is, instead of goals about a certain time, I’m focusing on how I feel after a race and trying to decrease my pain level. My goal at my last half marathon (which was almost double my best time from a decade ago) was to wake up the next morning in no more pain than I was the morning before the race. I’m happy to say that I achieved this goal. But it’s trickier to meet a goal like this because it’s not a simple time goal that I know when I cross the finish line that I’ve achieved. I had to guess at what effort level would help me achieve that goal.

Some years ago, I made a goal to have no goals for the whole year (I didn’t really manage this goal, but it did help me decrease a lot of my insanely high expectations for myself). I found that not stressing about goals the night before a race actually made my times better. Any ordinary person would probably be able to see the problem, looking in. But for me, seeing the problem didn’t mean I could fix it. Just stop stressing, I kept trying to tell myself louder and louder. That didn’t help, either. It was a combination of the no goals year and a lot of time spent figuring out what was causing sleep problems and how to address them. I actually bought a Garmin watch, originally for racing, but it turned out to have a feature on sleep that was super helpful. It told me that I was sleeping for a lot of the night when I thought I wasn’t sleeping. This eased a ton of my anxiety about sleep.

These days, my rule for “sleep” is that all I have to do is lie down quietly. If I do that, then I’m getting sleep. I can’t control if I toss and turn or have spiraling thoughts (at least not easily, though there are exercises I’ve learned that help some of these problems, too). The night before a race, I don’t have any problem sleeping now because I’ve redefined sleep. Some nights before a race, I don’t have a subjective experience of restful sleep, but my watch affirms that I was lying in bed quietly for eight hours. That’s good enough. And my watch has also helped me to set goals to lower my resting heart rate before a race, too, which is another stress indicator. I can’t control everything, least of all myself, but there are things I can control and I hyperfocus on those.

For my most recent race, I could control my heart rate and I could control how easy it felt. “Pain” is trickier for me because I have almost no subjective experience of pain while racing, and very little while doing any kind of exercise. This is why, for me, hitting the finish line is actually the worst part of the race, because that’s the first time I feel all the pain rushing in on me that my body hasn’t been processing for the whole time of the race. I suppose this is also why I tend toward endurance races, because it puts off the pain experience for the longest number of hours. I know this is weird, but I’m very far from the only endurance athlete who experiences pain this way.

The point here is that I had to guess at what was going to lead to me not waking up with pain the next day. It is hard to guess at that when I have a hard time feeling pain in the moment. I’ve spent most of my life as an athlete trying to push as hard as I possibly could during a race to achieve the best time. But as I’ve suffered more and more injuries with age, I’ve realized that I can’t keep doing that if I want to continue to be able to race for the next couple of decades. So this is my attempt to make a new set of goals that will help me to continue to be active and feel like life is worth living.

The real point of this essay has nothing to do with exercise or racing, however. The real point here is that sometimes other people encourage us to focus on external measures of what makes a good life. In Mormonism, those measures were mostly church attendance and the devotion of children and if you are lucky, grandchildren. Oh, and rising up in church leadership, though that’s really only for men. Women can take pride in their men rising up in church leadership, but not quite the same thing. In the corporate world, it’s your level in management and your salary, possibly your 401k amount, or if you’re in the FIRE community, it’s the age you can retire at.

I think sometimes we all need to do reverse goals to make life better. I remember early on in my time at my current job, there was a guy I was paired with to discuss how we could increase our KPI and he bluntly said to me, “Look, I work this job so that I can support my family and get healthcare, but I’m an inventor and that’s what I really care about. I’m only ever going to aim for the minimum to remain employed here.” At the time, I was shocked because I wasn’t sure that you were allowed to say that out loud. Still not sure you can say it out loud, but he did. And honestly, I think more and more that he had it right. I’m a writer, first and foremost, not a corporate employee. I’m going to play that game as much as it serves me. And reverse goals may be the way to do that.