Man am I happy to see 2016 gone. It wasn’t necessarily a bad year overall but it certainly presented me with challenges that seemed to be more of a long slog. Now we get to start with a clean slate.

For the first time in a long time I am not registered for any races and don’t have any specific goal races in mind.It certainly is bit freeing from the pressure of having to maintain a training plan and keep paying race reg fees.

Speaking of which, some races are now so pricey that I feel like race directors are making the decision for me. I’m at the point if I am going to pay $60 or more for a race that I should make it a destination race rather than pay that much to run in places I can go to every day.

That said, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been running.

I’ve been alternating between running a nice little three mile route near my home and doing the same on the treadmill. As I mentioned in my last post I have rediscovered the joys of running at night, even now that it is getting colder outside. It is supposed to snow overnight here in NYC and I’m looking forward to heading out sometime tomorrow and go running in it. Who am I, I hate snow!?!

This running for joy has allowed me to me focus on being more consistent, and surprisingly, I’m finding it much easier to do without a training plan. So much so that I joined Coach Jenny’s Challenge 2017 which is about being consistently active and creating new healthy habits. You can find out more about it here.

What I love about it so far is the instant, amazingly supportive community. This is something that I felt has been missing in some ways in my day to day running life. As we all know, sometimes you just need to change things up a bit or start doing things that you used to but haven’t done in a long time.

For me, that not only involves running for the pure joy of it, but getting back to going to my deep water running classes. Those brought so much joy to me and even helped me try yet other things, like improving my regular swim stroke in another class that the DWR instructor offered.

I’ve pretty much stopped using my Garmin and have using my Apple watch to track my runs. I was so stat and analytic heavy that I think that started taking the joy out of running. I can still get into the data and number crunching with the Apple watch but right now I’m just content with logging the miles in my paper log book and spreadsheet.

This little guy is going to stick around in 2017. (c) Stacey Cooper

I’m also continuing to use my motivation jar. It was just a great tool in getting me out the door and I netted a few hundred dollars in 2016. I’m hoping that I can bring in more than that this year. Think about having some extra cash on hand when you are at an expo for one of those destination races. I’m so tempted to get that massage thing that looks like a car buffer.

You can also do normal stuff with it like by running shoes or even a nice dinner while you are at that destination race. After all, you earned it!

I’m finding that there is so much more that I’m open to in ways of motivating me this year and that is such a great feeling because I haven’t had that in a really long time. Yeah, that was a bit cheesy but oh well.

I think just overall I’m looking forward to really being healthy. I feel better and that translates into wanting to do all this running and healthy living stuff. Hopefully that will mean more dough in the motivation jar.

Here’s to an awesome and healthy 2017!