I had set some goals for myself for 2022. Not resolutions, but goals. I feel like resolutions are often things to stop doing, rather than something to work towards. A resolution feels like a promise that you either stick to or you don’t. I planned out goals. I may not get there, but I’d like to be on the path towards it.

So what were they? And how did I do?

Finish off the NH 48

At the beginning of 2022, I had 23 summits left to complete the 48. Admittedly, completing 23 in a single year was a stretch goal. I completed 9 in 2018, 7 in 2019, only 3 in 2020 (thanks, pandemic!), and 6 in 2021. So 23 in a single year would be pushing it. Maybe kinda possible since several could be lumped together in multi-day trips. As of this writing, I completed 7 of the remaining 23. While that seems like I’ve fallen very short of my goal, I’m actually pleased with the summits I hiked this year. Try as I might, the easier hikes were completed in the earlier years, so these are more difficult hikes. For someone with a day job, and kids (and a kid who was going off to college, so I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could!), I didn’t do too badly.

The good news is that the 16 I have left can be done in 5 trips, possibly even 4. This will be a goal for 2023!

Other hiking accomplishments

I only hiked 52 miles this year, the least since I started hiking in 2018. However, as I said, I did cross off 7 NH 4000 footers from the list, which was better than 2021 and 2020.

Pain-free knees

My knees were causing me some issues. Was it just my weight? Or age? Not sure, but I wanted to focus on making them better, or at least as good as I could. Success!* As I wrote about here, I seemed to have found several causes for myself, and fixed them. Short answer, if you don’t feel like reading that post: stretching, footwear, protein, and weight.

*Just in the last week, they started bothering me again, but I’ve also gained weight back. So I’m going with weight as the main driver of knee pain for me.

Double-unders

At my gym, a lot of workouts give you an option to scale. For jumping rope, this often means x number of double unders, scales to twice as many single unders. Example: 100 double unders OR 200 single unders. If I can jump half the number of reps, I’m going to. I read up on how to get double unders. Seriously, I’ve watched a million youtube videos and read a billion posts. Intellectually, I know what I need to do. I also know I’m not there yet. So I made a program to work up to it. Like a couch to 5k for double unders. But I completely slacked off. I’d do a few days and then forget about it for weeks (ahem months) at a time. We don’t do them enough at the gym to get me up to speed, this was definitely a “homework” thing, and I didn’t do my homework. So unless a miracle happens in the next two weeks, this one will be moving to 2023.

Other Gym Accomplishments

I didn’t really set any goals, other than go and get better. Well, I went to the gym 197 days. That averages out to 4 times per week, and that includes missing the gym for several trips and COVID. I’m pretty pleased with that.

The gym focused on several major lifts for 2022. I wasn’t always great about writing down my numbers, or being there the day we did max lifts. But here’s what I’ve got. The “x4” means I lifted that weight for 4 reps, so likely would have gone heavier for a single rep had I been in class that day. “x2” means two reps, and again, likely would have gone heavier on the max day. Regardless, lots of progress here! Increased my bench press by 40 pounds! Back squat looks like I only increased 20 pounds, but I’ve been getting deeper than I used to (see above about knees) and my knees were bothering me the week we did the max rep in December (see above * about knees). So I think this is really a bigger improvement than it looks on paper. I KNOW I could show a big improvement on deadlift and I was bummed I missed the max lift day at the end of the year. It’s my favorite lift and I know I could have gotten a PR (previous max lift in Mar was 205).

Lift	Feb ’22	Dec ’22
Bench press	85	125
Back squat	145	165
Deadlift	155 (x4)	200 (x2)

Goals for 2023…

Finish the 48 and get double unders. I’d like to add a bunch more to the list, but I think I’ll stick with these two. Especially since they’re “carry over”. There are a lot of subgoals to get to these done. Both require lots of planning and whatever the opposite of procrastination is. My intent is to plan now, get started right away, and get them done.