The little things

I have been cycling for over year now and I am starting to do a lot of similar training rides to what I did last year. Part of this is just trying to work off the winter fat and some lost fitness.
While doing lots of these repeat rides, I come up on hills, sections of road, etc. that I rode all the time last year and I remember them being miserable sections of road. Some hills I at first couldn't climb without at least stopping once, or I was dying at the top of the hill.
Fast forward a year and a winter of virtually no riding, and getting back on the saddle, but still some fitness left. These places that used to be miserable are no longer much of anything to mention. The hills I used to barely be able to make it to the top, I now like to use them to stand up and push hard to the top to get my HR up and to get some good muscle built up while pushing hard up them.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I get too much time to think while on a bike sometimes, and sometimes I realize very crisply something about life. So, here are one of my on the bike thoughts.

People do not magically achieve their goals, by setting them and just getting there. So many people love to say, look how successful you are, or look how much you have lost, or congratulations on graduating, etc. Although these achievements, that once were goals, are just the combination of several to thousands of small goals accumulating to one large goal. If you can achieve your smaller goals, you will eventually meet your ultimate goal. Without meeting the smallest goals, you will never meet your ultimate goals.

An example; for me, it was to do STP last year, which was 206 miles. All last year, I thought I had one goal in mind, which was to do STP in one day, it really took me achieving several small goals, to make it to my achievement. These goals were things like riding 150 miles in a week, then 170... Ending up at around 400 miles a week! Without achieving my smaller goals, I could have never have made it to my final goal. Yes, this is a very simple theory, and no it does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out. However, it made me realize that nothing in life comes without a bunch of small goals, that eventually end up to meeting an achievement or goal. For me, I hope to no longer get intimidated by large problems, if there is a way to achieve the goal with smaller steps, I need to set these smaller goals, even the smallest goals to meet the smaller goals need to be thought of.