Last year, on one of my other blogs, I documented my (successful) attempt to do 3,650 minutes of dry practice in 2019. I learned a tremendous amount during that exercise, and one of those lessons was that putting some social pressure on myself through the blog helped me tremendously. This year I’m going to do a similar thing here.
The following are my personal goals for 2020. Though I was planning to post my dry practice goal, I was motivated to go a little further by reading Sunshine_Shooter’s 2020 goals. Like he said, a lot of people poo-poo New Year’s Resolutions, but I like them. Here are mine:
3,660 Minutes of Dry practice: I intend to do another year of daily dry practice. My goal, again, is an average of 10 minutes per day. Ten minutes a day spaces a decent amount of training (approximately 61 hours) over a full year, keeping recency-of-experience high.
I also want to improve on what I did last year. Though I made up the time, I had 40 days of missed training. I want to lower that number. My longest “streak” in 2019 was 46 days. I want to increase that number. I will post my dry-practice reports here every two weeks. In addition to my dry-practice reports, I’ll also be reporting on some other stuff…
Read Books: I used to chew through books. On my seven-month Iraq deployment I read over 150 books. I’ve gotten extremely lazy with reading. I recently read that Greg Ellifritz reads 10 to 15 books per month, and it made me feel real guilty. It also made me realize how many awesome books I’m missing out on. I’m going to shoot for a book a week, for a total of 52 this year.
Stay Tobacco-Free: I’ve used Copenhagen snuff since I was about 16 years old. I’m not going to tell you exactly how long ago that was…but it was a long time ago. I quit back on November 23rd. I think this is a huge preparedness/financial/fitness step: it saves money, improves dental health, lowers all sorts of health risks, and it’s one more thing I don’t need to “prep,” and no longer something I would take risks to obtain in an emergency. I could go on and on (even more importantly, getting rid of that can of dip opened up a pocket for a bigger, better can of OC spray…). . Don’t worry – I’m not going to be evangelizing quitting tobacco, but it’s the right move for me. Every dry-practice report will also contain an indicator that I’m still tobacco-free.
Other: There are a few other things I’d like to sign up for, but I potentially have a pretty major transition coming up this year. I hate to sign up for anything that may be out of my capability to complete. One of these is BJJ – I’m going to get in the dojo this year, but I’m not sure how to quantify it, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to stick with it through the summer because of the transition I mentioned.
I don’t expect this post to do a whole lot for most of you guys. These are just my personal goals, and my way of keeping myself honest. Happy New Year!
