2025 Fitness Goals & Finding Balance

Setting goals, ranting about how life is busy

The year is already like 10% gone, but I have some fitness goals for the rest of the year. Ultimately, this year I would like to retain strength at the very least, but ideally become stronger. I think I will need to gain weight by doing this, which may be difficult if I continue to run. For running, I want to generally become faster.

Running

I wasn't running at all this time last year. I started running sporadically mid-summer and ran a 23:15 5k in August, and a 21:35 5k in Thanksgiving. I'm running the Columbus 10k in June and would be thrilled to run under 42 minutes, but I've never ran a 10k race before, so honestly, I'll just be happy to finish. If I can get a sub-20 5k by the end of the year, that's my main "goal". At some point, I'd like to break my all-time 5k PR of 19:30, but that might have to wait another year unless I focus more on running and less on lifting

Weightlifting

Mid-January, I calculated my 1 rep maxes based on AMRAP (as many reps as possible) sets.

AMRAPS at ~152.5 lbs bodyweight:

  • Squat: 260 lbs x 5 reps. Estimated 1RM: 293 lbs
  • Bench: 177.5lbs x 4 reps. Estimated 1RM: 194 lbs
  • Deadlift: 330 lbs x 5 reps. Estimated 1RM: 371 lbs

This year, I'd at least like to try and maintain this strength while getting faster in running. My deadlift used to be better but I've found them much more difficult ever since running 20+ miles per week.

Weight

I'm currently hovering around 152 pounds. I think I'd like to hit 160 this year, since I've never been that high, and I feel like I really need to gain weight if I want to continue to see any strength improvements.

Balancing running, weightlifting, and ... everything else?

This has been tricky. I was doing 4 sessions per week for both weightlifting and running at the end of last year and it worked decently. Then I upped my running to 5x per week. But I just decided to bump it back down to 4x per week because I think the extra session mixed with the weights has taken a toll on my recovery. I think having a max of 1 day per week where I have to lift AND run is probably my upper limit for the time being.

My job is going to have a 5 day in-person return to office later in the year, and so it might be even more challenging for me to continue what I'm doing now. I'm thinking of maybe switching to a 5x run 2x lift week closer to my 10k race and then maybe doing 4x run 3x lift after that, or maybe something even less. It's already hard to find time to run or lift on days where I have to drive to the office since an hour of my day is lost to commute. I honestly can't imagine how people who have children or other responsibilities and fully in-person jobs could manage to find much time or energy to work out. It really has made me consider what I want my work-life balance to look like when I hopefully have kids in the future. I love running and lifting so much, but I definitely love it a lot less after I've driven to work, worked all day, driven back, and still need to make myself dinner and pack my lunch for the next day.

Sometimes I find that the whole week has flown by and I don't really know where it went. And it's not even that I feel like I've wasted it or spent it on things I would call objectively "bad" - most of my weekday is working, commuting, eating, exercising, etc. But sometimes I do feel like I wish life moved a little more slowly.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

— Seneca