Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Goals’ Category

300 Miles

While my surgery to correct FAI is now nearly two full years behind me (December 2011), I continue to reap the benefits of goal-setting during the recovery process.

As I wrote last year, my long-term rehab goal was to get fit enough to run Tough Mudder Tri-State in October 2012 (exactly one year ago today, coincidentally).  I achieved that goal, and then continued to focus on increasing my running.  My follow-up goal from there was to run 300 miles in 2013.  As much as I enjoy running, I figured having that target to shoot for would keep me more motivated to keep at it even when I wasn’t feeling it as much as usual.

I’m happy to report that I achieved my goal of running 300 miles on 12 September 2013, a solid 3 months and change before my deadline:

300 mi 1

 

And here’s a breakdown of mileage by month:

300 mi 2

I’ve continued to run since then, albeit at a much reduced rate, as my fitness focus is now back on weight training.  I’m lifting four days a week and only running occasionally, but at least that’s by design (a conscious decision) rather than by default (“I don’t feel like running today… or tomorrow… or this week…”).  My son has also developed an interest in running, so we go out for the occasional mile together as well.  A mile with him at his pace doesn’t do much for me physically, but does us both worlds of good emotionally.

My educational leadership program is grounded in the Educational Leadership Policy Standards, which emphasize goal setting to guide growth and program implementation.  While I’ve done all the coursework and understand it all from an intellectual standpoint, nothing has driven the point home for me quite like the experience of setting, achieving, and re-setting my own physical fitness goals over the last two years.

Now that I’ve hit my goals of completing Tough Mudder, running 200 post-surgery miles in 2012, and 300 miles in 2013, I’m still working on a goal related to my weight training.  My short term, “interim” goal is to make linear progression on all lifts 2.5-5 lbs per session, but I know that will only take me so far.  Once I figure out my long-term lifting goals, I know that having a target to shoot for will further help motivate and energize my fitness regime.

2012 By The Numbers

I don’t know if it’s my school psychology training or the ZOMG DATA craze that has gripped all facets of public education in the last few years, but I’m becoming increasingly interested in looking at the role numbers play in my life, specifically in terms of goals and accomplishments.  Dan Meyer and his readers have been doing their annual reviews visually for the last few years, but I’m not quite there.  I’m just going to throw out a few numbers that played a role in my life in 2012 in boring old text:

  • 208: Miles run since hip surgery and physical therapy
  • 1: Tough Mudder completed
  • 13: Pounds lost via Intermittent Fasting (in a 10-week period)
  • 950: Pictures taken (and kept) in my family digital photo album
  • 3: Edcamps attended and co-organized
  • 1: Cruise taken with my wife, kids, and parents
  • 1: Nationally syndicated game show recorded featuring a relative as a contestant (to air in Feb 2013 – more info soon!)
  • 6: Doctoral courses completed
    • 8: Doctoral courses completed in total
    • 8: Doctoral courses to go
    • 0.6: Doctoral thesis left to write
    • 4,060: Approximate mileage traveled from work (Lawrenceville, NJ) to grad school (New Castle, DE) to home (Perkasie, PA) (not even gonna tally the tolls paid; too depressing)
  • 5: Years I’ve been blogging (as of 1 Aug 2012)
    • 199: Total blog posts published as of 31 Dec 2012 (I published #200 on 1/1/13; this is #201)
    • 25: Blog posts published in 2012
    • 0: Months in 2012 in which I didn’t post at least one blog entry
    • 1: Months in the last five years in which I didn’t post at least one blog entry (damn you, November 2008!)

In 2013, I’d like to keep track of these:

as well as whatever else happens to catch my fancy.  What numbers were important to you in 2012?

Mind Over Mudder

Much is made in my ed leadership doctoral program of goals: organizational goal-setting, alignment with vision/mission, monitoring progress, etc.  Though I hadn’t originally intended to blog about this recent life event*, when I think about it in terms of goal-setting, it seems to parallel much of what my coursework has focused on.

After my surgery to correct femoral acetabular impingement late last December, I set myself both a short-term and a long-term goal for my rehabilitation.  My short-term goal was to run a post-surgery 5K on Memorial Day weekend.  The annual Doylestown (PA) 5K holds a special place in my heart, as we owned our first home in that town and lived there when our first child was born.  It wasn’t my fastest time, but on May 26, 2012, I did it (and have done a few since).

My long-term rehab goal was to get fit enough to run Tough Mudder, a 12-mile obstacle course through incredibly muddy terrain (“incredibly muddy” doesn’t begin to cover it; check out their website or Facebook page for pics).  The two nearest TM events to me took place in Poconos, PA in May, and Englishtown, NJ in October.  Being a Jersey boy born and bred, I chose the October event (that it would give me another five months to work on healing and conditioning was also a factor).

While I can’t say that having goals made me heal better or faster (that’s anatomy and physiology, as well as the dumb luck of having avoided any major cartilage damage), it was incredibly motivational for me during PT, especially before I was able to run on the treadmill and I was just doing basic stretching and resistance exercises.  Thinking that this (boring exercises) was what I had to do in order to get to that (running) helped get me through the tedium and focused me, even when my attention wanted to be anywhere but in that rehab room, side-stepping or squatting.

Even as I wrapped up PT and started running again, having the specter of Tough Mudder over me pushed me to increase my mileage, even as I was becoming complacent and satisfied with my times on 3-mile runs.

So did I meet my long-term rehab goal?  A picture is worth a thousand words:

Up next: my first 10K on November 3.  Once I get comfortable with that distance, I think the next logical step has got to be the half-marathon, which will basically be like the Tough Mudder minus the electricity obstacles and freezing water, right?  I’ll keep you posted.

Speaking solely as an individual, setting goals did motivate me to persevere in my rehab.  I would have done it anyway without the goals, but I feel that having an endpoint toward which to work fueled and charged my work (PT) in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.  Once the goals were reached, you move the goalposts back a bit further – not so much so that it becomes discouraging, but just enough to encourage growth.

Reflecting on this experience, I’m starting to get a better sense of how organizational goals (ideally should) charge our work as members of the organization… IF the buy-in is there.  As for me, I was as bought-in as I was going to get, what with my physical well-being on the line.  Now, if it was only as easy to get unanimous organizational buy-in…

*Shout-out to childhood friend, Dirty Birds teammate, and OG Tough Mudder Dan Staples, who, as we were catching our breath and staring down yet another obstacle, asked me, “So, you gonna blog about this?”  Yessir, Dan.  Yes, I am.

brb dissertating

I haven’t been able to blog as regularly as I like lately thanks to a number of factors, but a meeting I had the other night with my doctoral internship adviser spurred me to get back on here this evening.  In reviewing the goals I set for myself in my leadership plan back in September, we discussed blogging as a tool for both reflection and networking.  In the course of our discussion, I realized I haven’t blogged about my progress nearly as much as I planned to, so here I’ll outline a few quick status updates as well as some reflection.

Updates:

  • Chapters 1 and 2 of my dissertation are more or less in the can.  In my program, we start writing our dissertations in the first year, write Chapter 3 in the second year, then conduct our research and write the final chapters in year three.  After two grueling-but-ultimately-successful Disciplined Inquiry courses (read: Statistics), I submitted the first two chapters of my dissertation on distributed leadership in K-12 schools.  The feedback I have received has been overwhelmingly positive; I have some minor cleaning up to do, but I was fearing anticipating having to make much more significant revisions.
  • I wrote Chapter 2 in December, had hip surgery around Christmas, then wrote Chapter 1 in January-February.  That was probably the most intense, trying 3-month period I’ve had in a long time.
  • Coursework otherwise has been manageable.  I actually enjoyed my stats assignments, and understood the subject matter better than the last time I took grad-level stats in 2008.

Reflections:

  • Although it can be stressful rushing out of work exactly at 3:45 to race down to Delaware to arrive shortly after 5, I’m finding Friday to be an oddly optimal day to have night classes.  It’s not like I ever go out on Fridays anyway, and there’s no need to get up early and go to work the next day. 🙂
  • The cohort is much bigger than I thought it would be (30+ people), but I’ve started to develop some nice friendships within the group, and we’re all generally a supportive bunch.
  • The 7-week course cycle definitely pros and cons.  I really like cycling through the different courses so quickly (my interest wanes after a while; so sue me), but that also compresses the timeline for completing assignments.  With Cub Scouts one night a week, class one night a week, and, up until very recently, physical therapy two nights a week, what little free time I had left over had to be devoted to writing.  There’s very little wiggle room, which is incredibly stressful.
  • My cohort is comprised of students from three concentrations: organizational leadership (OL), higher ed leadership (HL), and K-12 leadership (EL; that’s me).  I am one of the few EL folks in a class of mostly OL and HL folks.  Everyone’s great, but I’m getting a bit antsy waiting to get to some real K-12-specific courses (and, more importantly, assignments that deal with K-12 leadership issues, not the general, broad leadership stuff we’ve discussed so far.  I know that will come next year, but I’m ready for it now!

I’ll spend an upcoming post outlining some pertinent points from my dissertation, so be sure to grab some popcorn for that one.  Hopefully I’ll have time to post again before another month goes by!  Til then, back to work…

Taking Stock

It’s hard to believe that the school year is 20% over already.  The past few months have been a whirlwind for me, due primarily to me starting both a new job and a new graduate program at the same time.  I’ve debated the wisdom of that decision several times over the course of September, but after a rocky start, things have finally evened out.  I feel comfortably settled into both my new job and my new school, and I’m happy to report I’m enjoying both!

The first course in my doctoral program, Experiential Learning, focused primarily on helping students to codify their beliefs about leadership and establish learning goals for the coming year.  In one of my papers, I established the following goal:

Goal #2: Reflect on my learning in a transparent manner.   I have long felt that honest reflection is one of the most vital components of learning, and I required my students to do it frequently, both verbally and in writing.  As a blogger of over four years, I have found great value in writing about my professional practice and considering feedback from my audience […] I hope to gain similar benefits from writing online about my experiences in the doctoral program as I have from writing online about teaching and school psychology.

So what are my reflections upon finishing my first course?  They’re much less to do with leadership and more to do with biting off more than I can chew.  I figured it would be difficult, but doable, but I seriously underestimated how much all this newness in my life would take out of me.  I don’t feel that either my studies or my work suffered as a result of my decision, but my sleep patterns, stress levels, and general well-being certainly did.  I had the opportunity to defer starting my studies for a year, and in retrospect that wouldn’t have been the worst idea, but what’s done is done.  Moving forward, I need to be much more sensible about balancing my responsibilities.  Perhaps that’s not such a bad lesson for a future leader to learn now rather than later.