VIII | Goals and Goalposts

24/10/22

 The pieces are now coming together for my new life of living in England. Not much left to do now after all this time, between holidaying and organizing the things I’ve needed to actually live and work in this country. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have family over here that have supported me with this, they made things a hell of a lot easier and less stressful for me. It’s been awesome getting to meet them and have the opportunity to actually get close as a family, as well as strengthening relationships with ones I already knew. It means a lot to me.

I’ve been looking forward to properly settling down for a while now. It was a surprisingly tough decision to figure out where I wanted to live to be honest. I made Hampshire and Devon my only options seeing as these are the areas I stayed in and I liked both of them. I built connections in both of these counties, it made sense to narrow those areas down for now. Living close to my family in Alton, Hampshire would have made the most sense to begin with. It would have been comforting to be close to family, would likely be easier to find a job, and I probably wouldn’t have needed a car. I really do like that area, there’s plenty of walks around, which I’m all about. It’s not that far from London too which could be handy. I’d spend a lot of time running and walking through the Woods in Alton, trying to keep an eye out for Deer and watching hundreds of squirrels run about. I loved it, it became one of my favourite things to do. With Devon, I had in mind that I knew some people there after staying there for two months, which is nice. It might be harder to get a job, and I would definitely need a car. But there’s plenty of coastal towns to visit, lots of bush and coastal walks too. I love the scenery, and I know I’d make full use of a car to go and visit Devon’s finest areas regularly for walks, runs, etc. Not to mention it would be easier to do anything in general if I was forced to have a car.

I ended up choosing Devon, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to live there not long after arriving in the county for the first time. While it was a tough call to make, my heart was always leaning towards Devon. I have a good feeling about being here, I figured I better listen to that feeling and see how it goes at the least. These days I try to follow my instincts more and back my decisions, whether it all works out or not. So when I got back from Europe, I bought a car in Hampshire and took off back to Lynton and Lynmouth where I stayed with a host family for a couple of months previously. They were kind enough to offer me a room to board in. One less thing to worry about thanks to those legends and their spotty dogs. So now I got my car and living situation sorted, excellent. I’ve been back in L&L for several days now. I had my family from Alton come stay in Mortehoe in Devon for a few days just after I arrived, where we went to Lynmouth and Woolacombe too. Bloody good to spend time with them over in this part of the country. 

Now it’s time to find a job! Pretty much the final piece to the puzzle of living here. Right now the only real lead I have is through joining the Barnstaple Rugby Club. I put several feelers out on Devon job searching groups on Facebook before I arrived in Devon again. The assistant director of Barnstaple rugby saw one of the posts, and my profile where he saw that I played rugby. He said come along and join the club, meet some people and I’ll likely make connections that’ll lead to a job. I know full and well that rugby clubs are great for this kind of thing so it sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Better yet, I’ll be playing rugby again! I unfortunately only managed to play one game this year in NZ, where I played like rubbish too, so I’m happy to get some more footy in me this year. I’ve been trying to keep my fitness up in preparation for it.

2/11/22

I want to use this entry as an opportunity to talk about a few of my goals too. I’m curious to see if writing them down here will prove to be more effective than how I usually do things towards goal setting. These types of goals are ones that I would normally slack on, so they’re the ones I’m going to list. The experiment here is to see if anything really comes of these goals, since it’s not just me who would know about them. Over the last few years I’ve been writing goals down for myself, I think it’s something everyone should do. However, I find that I never seem to hold myself very accountable if all of a sudden I lose interest, or if something has knocked me off course. I would be quick to blame life’s obstacles for losing interest or losing progress. Or worse, sometimes I’d actually be ok with the idea of letting myself down for goals like these because it’s only concerning me and no one else, which I find is total bullshit when I spell it out like that. For example, three months ago I got my fitness up to the highest it’s ever been. There was one week where I did three 10km runs and one 15km. Bare in mind that I used to be lucky if I did one or two 10km runs in a single year, let alone 4+ in one week. This was during a time where I was avidly always ticking off targets and writing new ones in my journal when it came to running. I felt super proud of myself and wanted more, the feeling of consistent personal success was addicting. Since I’ve been an adult I’ve been my harshest critic and rarely admit when I’m proud of myself for something. So feeling like this through running and taking these wins, I find it so rewarding. I love how something like running can challenge what you believe are your physical and particularly mental limitations. The feeling of doing better than what you think you can do is always a good one. Once I did my 15km run, I thought right - my new goal is a 21km run, in other words a half marathon. But then I spent a trip over to London for a week and didn’t train… I came back from there with zero motivation and I couldn’t seem to reason with myself as to why I wanted to run 21kms in the first place. I seemed to just magically forget about the reasons I just mentioned for why I love running. This dent in my routine made me lose all the motivation I had towards this goal, and there wasn’t anyone to blame but myself. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier, letting life’s obstacles be exactly that - obstacles. I just let the flow of my training stop right there, not willing to move around this "obstacle" and continue - even if it meant I had to go back a few steps in order to get around it. Instead I just turned around, took the ball and went home. I was lazy, and fooled myself into becoming uninspired. I didn’t stop running exactly, but I ran a lot less and with far less purpose and intention than I originally had for a while. This is probably the strongest example I have for what I’m trying to say, but there have been a few situations like this in the past too. Life is always going to get in the way like that sometimes, and even though I understand this - I still struggle to hold myself accountable. For some reason doing something like that just for me doesn’t seem to cut it enough at this point in time. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but that’s clearly the way my brain ticks. It ticks in a way where I feel as though I need to be feeling like I’m doing something for more than just myself. So yes, this is why I’m listing some of my goals here. I want to trick myself into thinking that if people read this and that if I stop trying to reach these goals, then in a weird way I feel like I’d be letting more than just myself down, or at least feel like I’ve lied - which would bother me. Ultimately, of course I’d only be letting myself down though should I fail to follow through. I wouldn't want any of these feelings, so I'd better just keep at it, right? I want to follow up on this entry one day after writing this down, in the hopes that I see levels of achievement from the goals I’m about to list.

These goals are going to be treated more like milestones, something I can work towards, rather than something vague like “Find dream job”. Because while that is a goal of mine, I’m not exactly going to bet money on if I’ll find something like that anytime soon. Not to mention I can’t visualize what something like that would look like, it’s something I can’t really work towards in a sensible structure because I don’t know what I’m looking for. The following list is one that’s specific, relatively simple, and I more or less know what I need to do to get there.

1. Do a 21km run before the end of the year.

I know I can do this one, I’ve always known. I’m the sort of guy who can pull a 10km run out of his ass without any training, so of course I can do this one with some work put into it. There are no excuses for failing this one before the year has closed, it will be done. I do fear a bit that running a lot would affect my next goal, guess that means I’ll have to smack this one out pretty quickly then.

2. Weigh 85kgs before the end of the year, 92kg before 6/6/23

Ok, so I know I’ve gotten skinnier since I left New Zealand 5 months ago, but if the scales I just used are correct - it’s worse than I thought. I used to always float around 80-82kgs or heavier depending on what kind of physical activity I’d get into over the past few years. I’ve even been heavier than 85kgs at one point. However, now - and I really hope the scales are wrong, apparently I weigh 77kgs. I imagine this is a result of walking and running all the time, along with unintentionally eating less. I’ve had physically demanding jobs my entire working career too, so not working probably has affected me physically. My real goal is to get to around the 90-92kg mark, but that might take a lot longer than I thought it would so I figured it’s best to be a bit above what I was before. I want that weight before 6/6/23, exactly a year following my arrival in the UK. It’s funny though, recently I’ve been insecure about how skinny my arms are. I’ve never really felt that way before, but after looking at some of the recent pictures I’m in, I’m like jeez I need to do something about that! I recently started eating way more and better, as well as signing up to a gym and doing home workouts too. This is even more important now that I’ll be playing a higher grade of rugby compared to what I’ve been used to in the past few years. After seeing and meeting some of the lads at rugby training recently too, this has definitely fuelled my desire even further. I don’t wanna noticeably be a toothpick next to them!

3. Be selected for higher grade rugby through my club rugby efforts by the end of next season

I hate to say that this is the most unrealistic goal in my eyes, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try and work hard towards it. Much of this can be driven from my other two goals. I sure as hell know that my current skinny ass wouldn’t fit the mould for next level rugby, heck I haven’t even played a game for Barnstaple - I don't even know if I'm cut out for that yet! I know that this requires more than just muscle and strength, but I want to do whatever it takes to get there. Even if I don’t, I’m going to fucking well try. I definitely need to sort my shocking eyesight out to aim high though, because I’m super blind on the footy field these days as it is…  Anyway, I’ve loved rugby almost my entire life. I was a typical Kiwi kid dreaming of becoming an All Black as he was growing up, I never actually considered anything else right up until the end of high school. While that dream will definitely never happen - I do want to see how far I can go when I push myself properly towards my rugby. If anything, I owe it to the kid who dreamed about his rugby for so long.

Of course I have other goals, some bigger, some smaller. But these are the ones I want to put my focus on right now, they’re what I want to put my energy into. I’ve latched time limits on these ones too, which I can’t realistically do for some of my other goals. Another goal of mine is to go to Scotland and walk in the mountains, though that's something I really want to do - right now I can’t predict a time for when I can do that. I know it will be done though. Right now, it makes sense for me to focus on things like developing myself and my body. Even if I don’t accomplish the third goal listed, chances are I’ll be a whole lot happier than what I was before I started working towards it anyway.