Goals for Senior Runners
In my Sports Psychology class at UVM this fall, we were able to choose a topic for a research project on goal setting. Of course, I jumped at the chance to do this for senior runners! And for this post, I’m drawing from my project write-up. Goal setting theory (GST) is used to improve performance in many endeavors. In sport, GST has been applied to both teams and individuals, with clear links to building skills and task achievement. Goals have been broadly grouped as subjective or objective. Subjective goals could include “I want to keep running” while an objective goal might be “I want to run competitively until age 80 and maintain a 70% age-grade standard”. Objective goals can be subdivided into process, performance, and outcome goals. In sport, objective goals should be: (1) moderately difficult to achieve; (2) both short and long term; (3) specific; (4) feedback looped. An oft-used acronym to critique goals is SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timebound. It’s no secret we senior runners encounter constraints not faced by younger runners. These include various physiological changes that begin to appear in our 30s but accelerate with aging. These include changes in: (1) … Continue reading