With the new year upon us and resolution advice everywhere, it’s the perfect time to get ready for your most successful athletic season yet. If you’re a competitive athlete, you may be in your off-season. If so, this list is timely as you get ready for a new athletic year. But even if you're training right now, these tips can be used at any time, even in the middle of your season. The following approach may seem a little overboard for casual athletes, but if you really want to improve your performance, following these steps will set you up for your most successful athletic year yet.

Learn Your Lessons
Before you can start setting goals and building your schedule, you need to spend time honestly reflecting on your previous year's performance. Athletes tend to overlook this crucial step when setting their goals, but reflecting on your past season(s) allows you to make goals you'll be happy with. You may reflect alone, or you may find it helpful to talk it through with someone close to you. Think about how you felt about your achievements, but don't concentrate solely on times and placements. Were you satisfied with your performance? Did it meet your social needs? How did it fit with your family and work life? Think about the whole picture.

Define Your Success
After you have a firm handle on last year and lessons learned, it’s time to determine what success means to you. Don’t let your friend’s and family’s views of success dictate your perceptions. Your definition of success may not be concrete or measurable — it might be as vague as simply having fun on weekend runs with friends. Try not to define success by times or other numbers, which may leave you feeling hopeless. If you think of success only as qualifying for Boston or Kona, then what if it doesn’t come to pass? Was it not a successful year? I like to keep success as a high-level idea built around individual growth and learning. If I grow as an athlete and person, while enjoying the journey, then I feel successful. I save the rigid times and placements as the supporting goals. The best athletes have the drive to win, but understand that success is not defined by a single result. If you figure learning, improving and growing into your definition of success, then the results come naturally.

Believe In Your Vision
Before you set your individual goals, you need to identify your end goal. You need to envision a future state: an event, a point in time, a time on the clock. Just like your definition for success, your vision is going to be personal. It needs to have tangible aspects that you can see and feel when you think about it. This is your time to dream big, but you must believe that it's possible. Your vision shouldn't just skim the surface, like “I think I could maybe run a 3:15 marathon.” Instead make it a strongly-held belief that you know you have the ability and drive to make a reality. You can dream as big as you want, but if it doesn’t match your deepest beliefs, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.

Your vision should be private, because it’s only important to you. Also, make sure that it's consistent with your definitions of success. If your vision is to win your age group at an Ironman, but your measures of success include not missing any of your children’s school events, games or recitals, then you have a huge disconnect.

Create Your Goals
Once you've completed the above steps, you can finally set your goals. Most people skip directly to this step, but without understanding yourself, these goals lack substance. You’ll want to create several goals that support your vision and this is where you answer the questions of what it will take to achieve them. Once you have a few overarching goals based on the path to your end goal, create two or three supporting sub-goals for each. This is where you can put in your numbers. If you want to run a marathon at a certain pace, then you need to do a tempo run of a certain pace and mileage at least three weeks out. Then break each of those sub-goals down into bullet points of what you need to do to accomplish. After a few minutes, you’ll have a detailed list of what you want and need to do athletically over the year.

Build Your Year
Now that you have all of the information, you need to set up your year. This is where you build your schedule, fill in races and create training and recovery cycles. Skipping directly to this step is fine if you just want to race for fun. But if your goals include getting faster and/or placements, you should only build your year and schedule as one of the last steps. If you build your schedule first, or haphazardly without critical thought, then your year and the events you’ve chosen won’t necessarily support your vision. Your schedule should help you create the conditions for you to achieve that future state.

Let Go of The Word “Sacrifice”
I often hear people throw around the word sacrifices. I don’t even let that word enter into my thought process. If you believe that you're sacrificing a lot to meet your goals, then you always feel that you’re missing out on something. It starts to seem like your goals have control of your life. Once you have your year set up, goals defined and your vision driving you where you want to go, get rid of the idea of sacrifice. It’s a simple decision. If you decide to train to make all of the above happen, then there are no sacrifices.