Michael: Process, Performance and Outcome

The bland cloud cover
Dulls the wind and dims the light
On this summer day.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

On this day of making resolutions I thought I’d Google types of goals just to clarify my thinking before solidifying my goals for the near future.

I looked at the first five sites that popped up and my thoughts about what would be said about outcome and process goals was pretty much spot on but the inclusion on some sites of the category of performance goals was a bit of a revelation. I hadn’t really taken the performance goal category into consideration, but now that I’ve looked it over, it seems a logical intermediary step.

The skeleton of the process looks like this; The process are the workouts that will lead to measurable performance, which may or may not lead to a specific outcome. Outcome goals are generally described as not under your control, but I think that’s a bit of a simplification, and not entirely accurate.

For example, let’s say I want to run my next 10k under 40 minutes (Performance Goal). That could logically lead me to conclude that I should do at least 3 months of workouts that include tempo runs that will prepare me to physiologically maintain a pace that will achieve a 40 minute 10k (Process Goal). However, if the course is hilly, or I get injured, maybe I’ll fall short of the outcome I’d like to have achieved. Given my performance goal, I might also have sneaky aspirations of placing in the top three in my age group (another outcome goal), but that’s dependent on not only my time, but other people‘s times as well, and unless your of the Tanya Harding school of achievement, that’s not likely to be under your control.

Here’s where it gets a bit murky. Let’s say I want to beat my age group record in the Bull Dog 25k (an outcome/ performance goal). In order to do that I’ve got to run 4 minutes faster over that course than I’ve ever run before. That’ll set the parameters for my process goals. A very good guy named Ron has the record and has won our age group 8 out of the past 9 years.

This is the last year we’ll hopefully compete against each other in this age group at that race. I don’t see any harm in setting my sites on beating Ron and setting an age group record in the last year we’ll be in the 50-59 category. It may be a stretch, but it’s doable. And I don’t feel that considering all of the goals; process, performance, and outcome, in anyway diminishes the value of any one of them, despite the negative slant given to outcome goals as defined by the sites I looked at.

If Ron beats me (again), I can live with that. If I fall short of the record, all right. It hurts to fail but pain can be a very useful part of the goal setting process. No matter what happens this year, I’ll take that into account when I aim for the 50k record when I turn 60 in 2018.