Hey everyone!  I’m super excited to be a guest blogger here at Bia Sport every week.  I’m a back-of-the-pack age group triathlete just trying to get myself into some semblance of fitness and appropriate weight (ugh…always a struggle somehow).  I did my first triathlon this past fall and have completed 3 sprints so far.  It’s been a great path full of ups and downs, challenges, and successes.  The successes taste so sweet, which is what keeps me moving forward.  I love this sport called triathlon.  It’s hard to think that only 9 months ago I would have told you you were nuts if you thought I’d ever do a triathlon.  Wow!!

I’m a life coach in my real life.  What I find so amazing is that a good portion of my personal growth and information that I draw on now for my coaching comes from triathlon and all that goes into it.  All of us women athletes understand a bit about overcoming fear, pushing past our comfort zone, creating and achieving goals, celebrating successes, cursing at roadblocks.  Isn’t that all just part of life too?  There are so many parallels.

I love Bia Sport and what it stands for.  I love that women have the space and place to come together to encourage one another as we all work toward achieving our personal goals.  I love that we can track our workouts and our goals and share our stories along the way.  So I asked the gals at Bia if they’d be interested in having me post a weekly blog that kind of combines some of my life coaching expertise with what we all are doing here at Bia-Sport.com…training, getting stronger, getting fitter, losing weight, working one step at a time toward goals, and cheering each other on along the way.

So here I am…mom of 3, life coach and owner of Tempo Life Coaching, newbie triathlete, and Bia-Sport     blogger.  I invite you to follow me here (I’ll follow you back), ask questions, offer suggestions of topics that interest you.  I love comments and feedback, so write away .  I can be reached via email or Facebook.

Thank you for the welcome, and I look forward into jumping straight into my blog this time next week.

Until next time…

~Coach Carrie

Our goals tool in Bia follows the SMART structure and kicks it up another notch. We automagically track progess for you and wrap you in a community of support.

Having others to encourage you AND knowing that your progress is inspiring others is the unspoken secret to the SMARTest goals.

I’ve been really inspired by others’ goals I’ve see this week:

Lisa Gonazales – who ran her FIRST Ultra-marathon this weekend – gave me goal envy with this:  ”My goal for 2012 – Run races with the names of animals in them. That’s it! 2012 is all about fun, adventure, & running w/friends on dirt.”

OMG. Brilliant! …even if all those races fall between Turkey and Reindeer season. (Check Lisa out @runlikeacoyote or on her blog - her story is awesome!)

Melissa P. (@StatofLims and one of the first women on the Bia site!!) has the goal of working out more with other women. I know that can be a life changing goal because it was *my* goal last year….and look where I am now. Some might say I overachieved on that front!

At the end of the day my athletic goals don’t just exist for the sake of an endorphin rush. When I work for a new FIRST it makes me more powerful, more fearless, and more energized for all the other aspects of my life. So in thinking about what FIRSTs I want to bite off this year, I am thinking about what is going to keep me energized and happy and sane enough to counter balance the stress of launching a new business.

Last year I focused on three FIRSTS related to “personal records” and “never-befores”.

• I did my FIRST sub-2 hour half-marathon
• I ran my FIRST marathon.
• I didn’t achieve my 3rd first: a sub-6 hour half-ironman, but only by a few minutes and entirely because I bonked. 

I say this all the time, but I love love love to race! 2011 was rough in that regard. I think I missed more races than I made with work and family craziness and the disaster of the exploding Subaru. (more on that later.) I need to be realistic about my training this year – launching a new company takes an extrodinary amount of time. And I don’t want to have another disappointing season of missed races from next year.

Therefore, the FIRST I am going to build my goals around for 2012 is Priorities.

Show up at Every Race: Start line = Winning. My excuses/reasons for missing so much last year were all over the map, and probably none fo them avoidable, but the one that effected me the most was missing Orangeman Half Ironman.

My car engine literally exploded on the drive to the race. Like BOOM exploded with smoke and fire (ok, maybe it was just the reflection of the brake lights in the smoke – but it looked like fire to me!) A hole the size of a silver dollar in the engine and shrapnel everywhere under the hood! The hubs had to come retrieve me from the side of the road at 5:15 in the morning. I was pretty shaken up and just wanted to go home.

In retrospect if we would have hustled I could have made it to the race in time for the last swim wave start, but I didn’t even try. And THAT is what disappointed me most. This was my favorite race course. I was absolutely physically peaked.  I was meeting friends there. I didn’t even try! I actually cried I was so angry at myself.

Lesson Learned: Always show up at the start line.

Race with Girlfriends:  I shared a room at Desert Tri with Tina from LATri. It was the first time I had done anything Tri related with a gfriend. As silly as it was we had so much fun and I realized combining girl time with racing is going to be essential to my happiness/sanity this year.  I am starting off right, by booking a group house for Oceanside 70.3. We have 7 women, ages 30-70 in our crew. Two are Ironman Kona Champions and one is sure to win her age group that weekend (AG 70-74 no less!!). Go big or go home, huh?

Race for someone other than myself: Many women race for something other than themselves by choosing a charitable cause, and raising money and awareness for it as part of their race training. I love that. My cause is women achieving their firsts in business and in sports. I know it sounds corny, but it’s true. So in addition to racing my own events with my sights set on my own PR’s  I am doing two things:

1. I am joining a friend on her race as a race buddy to hold her accountable to her training and  help push her to achieve an important FIRST.

2. I will volunteer for at least two races this season: One will be an IM Lake Placid so I get a sneak peak of what I’m in for next year (yes, that was an early commit!). One will an all-women’s race, maybe as a swim buddy. There is nothing more breathtaking than a sea of pony-tails ready to kill it!

I also have a stretch goal about becoming a  @chocmilkrefuel ambassador, absolutely inspired by Another Mother Runners performance on the Rock and Roll Vegas video, but I’ll save that for a different post….

I can’t wait to be inspired by all the new goals and FIRSTs women are starting to track in Bia! I also can’t wait to find our where everyone is racing – that will help me pick my races to volunteer at.

Next post….My 2012 Race Schedule.

At Bia, we’re big into Goals.  You have to name it to claim it, track it and celebrate progress.  We’re so into goals, we built a goal setting tool just for you!

Here are our five tips on goal setting:

1) Make your goal something real and measurable, for instance successfully completing a certain event or running/biking/swimming a certain distance or split. This helps highlight how far you have come and gives you an actual ‘Yes I’ve done it!’ moment. More vague goals such as ‘I want to become a faster runner’ never give you a finish line to celebrate on.

2) Make your goal something that is important to you, something you would love to achieve and are excited about. This positive emotion will help you ride through the inevitable bad session along the way.

3) Not to easy, not too hard but just right.  If your goal is too easy you won’t be motivated to achieve it but if it is too hard it will feel completely out of reach. Set your goal right between these two points so it will be a real challenge but is still something you feel your can just achieve, this will keep you motivated and on your toes.

4) Have and end date!  Having an end date it critical  You need time long enough to make some good improvements but not so long that you become stale or risk burnout. A period of four to eight months ahead is about right. If you have an important target further away then set yourself one or two sub-goals along the way and get focused on those first.

5) Tell someone else your goal to help commit you to it.

At Bia, we have a great option to share your goal with those on Facebook and Twitter – “cheer me on and hold me accountable”.

We’re pretty excited here at Bia about 2012.  We’ve worked hard this last year to really look at what motivates us as women to get on the path of “first”.  Not first place necessarily, but firsts – first 5k, first half-marathon, first triathlon and sometimes it’s 7pm and it’s the first time I’ve had to myself all day and make it to the gym, a spin class or a walk.

We hope you will join us in 2012 in setting goals, logging your workouts and races, encouraging others.  If you haven’t done so already, go to http://launch.bia-sport.com and enter your email address to get your own URL to our launch to share with friends.  It’s always more fun with friends!  Plus, if you get 5 to sign-up at the launch, you get some cool Bia schwag.  Be an influencer!