home for an island

I am pretty sure that I am an athlete. I have been active my whole life (soccer as a youngster, soccer and track in high school, ultimate, casual running, rock climbing, and bicycling in college and beyond) and constantly try to be as fit as I can be. However, since I stopped participating in competitive sports I don't have the constant desire to be better that I had before. My athletic pursuits are more recreational and social at this point, which doesn't give me the same sense of achievement that I had come to expect.

To that end, I have some new athletic goals.

Climbing:
At the end of February, I would like to be confident top-roping 5.11 b/c indoors, and bouldering at least V4 indoors.

Running:
I would like to run a 5k under 18:00 minutes on Thanksgiving, and run 1000+ plus miles in 2008. I am also toying with the idea of running the Boston Marathon, but that would be more of a fringe benefit than an actual goal.

The Plan:
I am going to MetroRock on Wednesday with Tim. This is the best gym in New England, and Tim is the best climber that I know. I hope to use this quality resource in conjunction with this quality facility to start focusing my climbing and learning how to improve myself. I'd like to start climbing at Metro once a week, and supplement it with at least one other night climbing at the BU gym.

I plan to start running three days a week, starting today. The idea is to run no less than 4 miles per day and work myself up to 7 miles. This should give me an excellent base for running that 5k, and more than allow me to achieve my goal of 1000 miles. To put that in perspective, I'm going to need to run 2.74 miles per day, or 19.18 miles per week. Running 6 miles per day, three days a week gets me 18 miles per week, so adding another mile and change to one of those days would allow me to hit my mark. If I decide to run 4 days a week, I would only need to run about 5 miles per day.