2026 Goals

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I did it! 2025 miles in 2025! I wasn’t a couch potato last year, despite using Tayto as a stand-in on my 2025 mile bib photo.

This was my fifth attempt at the Run the Year mileage goal, and the first time I reached the goal: run/walk/move 2025 miles in 2025. I figured out some things about my fitness needs and wants along the way.

First, I’m goal-oriented and that can definitely help me to keep up momentum in whatever I have going on. Unfortunately it can also backfire on me. The first four years I fell short of the mileage goals, and when I got sick in 2023 I saw how far behind I was on the goal and just kind of chucked it in the trash and gave up. That’s not good, but it also means I need to set and adjust my goals along the way to make sure that I don’t just stop.

Second, having the mileage goal meant I fixated on that number. Rather than making each workout a quality workout, I sometimes just got on my Peloton bike and did an easy scenic ride to get in the daily miles. I did build some muscle, maybe about two pounds if I can believe my scale, but I reached a fitness plateau and stayed there rather than push myself to reach the next level.

Third, I just ignored strength workouts, and mostly ignored stretching.

This year I’m setting a minute goal on the Peloton Annual 2026 Challenge of 7,000 minutes. I managed 3982 minutes last year and did extra time on the scenic rides as cool-downs that didn’t count toward the yearly minutes. I also plan to add in strength training for muscles and walks and runs to help build bone mass.

To see how this compares with last year, I plan to count “mileage,” too. This will include the biking and other movement, and I’ll count strength training as 20 minutes of working out = 1 mile.

Thursday Writing Prompt No. 170

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Hideous AI-generated “art”

I was bored and decided to play with an AI “art” generator. Yes, I use quotation marks, because what I got is something so bizarre that calling it art is being overly generous. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that jazz. Facetiousness aside, I decided to make the art this week’s Thursday Writing Prompt.

You can see that the image appears to be an old 1950s-era advertisment, and there’s some messed-up text there. Some of the words are actually legible, I can make out “hogs” and “freeze.”

So here’s this week’s prompt: imagine that you work for a 1950s advertising firm and you’re working for a client that is selling cookies. Your task is to explain to them why this ad is the best thing your agency can come up with, and to do that, you’ll have to write the text for the ad (because what is there now is placeholder text).

What do you write? Imagine that the … uh, “art” … remains unchanged for the advertisement, so work with what you have. No, stop! Don’t laugh so much. Yes, the man’s head is coming out of the cookie sheet. Doesn’t everyone’s?

 

Thursday Writing Prompt No. 169

 

ImageThis week’s Thursday Writing Prompt is to write a brief plot outline for a children’s picture book. Look, I’ve never written for kids, but I don’t have to — you do! Ha ha! No, it will be fun, really.

If you do an internet search for how to write for children, most of the steps involved are the same steps that you would take to write any fiction. The difference seems to be that you need to have a much better grasp on who your target audience is for the book. Writing for adults is basically the same whether your reader is 30 or 60, but a year or two difference in children’s ages is a huge change, and writing for them involves more than just adjusting your vocabulary.

Books for younger children also seem to focus on a single topic, rather than contain a long rambling story. The stories are accompanied by colorful illustrations and the children spend as much time looking at the pictures as they do reading the story. Don’t worry about the pictures, just pretend that you already have an artist who’s going to illustrate your book. If you really get into this week’s prompt, you can write instructions to the artist for what you want to have drawn for each page.

But first, do a little research and decide what age range you want to write for. Then pick a topic and ask what a child might want to know about it. Farm life? Maybe kids want to know whether chickens can fly, or if cows are ticklish. Urban life? How many taxis are there in New York City? What’s it like to work on building a skyscraper? Are there really alligators in the sewers?

If you want something easy, an evergreen topic, such as having a bad day at school or visiting a museum, are likely to be good choices to get started with.

Thursday Writing Prompt No. 168

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This week’s Thursday Writing Prompt is a mystery.

Ha! No, the content isn’t a mystery, the prompt is about writing a mystery. I’ve tried plotting a couple of mystery novels and it’s not easy. I have this great set-up, and my characters have their bios and their accents and their outfits, and then I get stuck in the middle and don’t know what I’ve set myself up for.

So for practice, this week’s prompt is about sketching an outline for a mystery story plot. Don’t worry about describing the characters, but include a short list of no more than five people who will inhabit your story. More can be added later, but for the initial outline just keep it simple.

Start with what happens (a murder, a burglary), list your five characters, then move forward with the plotting and decide how the story will start and how it will end. Good luck with your plot, may you spin a good yarn!

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