New year’s revolutions

Generally speaking, I don’t like new year’s resolutions.I figure if you want to lose weight, or give more to charity, or spend more time with your family, or get out of debt, or quit smoking, you should just do it. Don’t wait for Jan. 1 to roll around. So I refuse to make new year’s resolutions. If anybody asks, I always say my only resolution is not to make any resolutions.OK, so maybe I should resolve not to be such a jerk.Regardless of my resolution aversion, this time of year I do tend to look back at what I’ve done and not done and look ahead to what I hope to do in the future, and that includes things athletic or even semi-athletic or simply physical.I looked back at 2008, for instance, and saw I rode my bike close to 2,000 fewer miles than I had in 2007, and that was down about 1,000 miles from 2006. In other words, over the past two years combined my bike mileage was down about the length of a trip across the United States.But I missed more than half of this past December rehabilitating a bum Achilles tendon (that’s more than 500 miles right there). And I ran more this past year than last year, and that cut into my bike time, too.However, I didn’t have a mileage goal in mind. Though I keep track of how many miles I ride daily, weekly, yearly, I didn’t resolve to ride a certain distance. I just wanted to ride as much as I could without losing balance.I do tend to do better, though, when I have goals in mind. A couple of years ago, I wanted to finish my first 100-mile bike ride, or century, and trained with that in mind. Last year, I had one goal — to complete a big organized ride in the Colorado mountains — but I missed out on that goal by failing to sign up in time to participate. Thus, a lot of my riding was somewhat aimless: With nothing to aim for, I didn’t so much train as work out.This year, however, I have a couple of bike-related goals, including that Colorado mountain ride I missed out on last season.I figure with those goals in mind, my mileage likely will go up, but if it doesn’t, so what? It’s not like I’m breaking a resolution.