I love how the New Year gives us all a chance to wipe the slate clean and set some new goals for the upcoming year.

I firmly believe in setting goals, not making resolutions. Goals are something you can measure and take actionable steps to achieve. Resolutions are too wishy-washy for me. You lay out all these things you'd like to do, with no plan of how you're going to get there.

With goals, you give yourself a roadmap. They're focused. You have a plan and know what you need to do to get to your desired end result.

As always, I have tons of things I'd like to work on in the New Year, but I've decided to focus on just a few goals, whose progress I can consistently measure through out the year to gauge progress.

1. Break two hours in the half marathon. This is a bit of a reach goal for me. My current half marathon PR is 2:07. To shave more than 7 minutes off my time is going to require some hard training, dedicated speed work and flat and fast race course. I'm considering possible spring and fall races with fast courses. I'd like to use the spring races as a good baseline, to trim the PR a little bit and then really focus on the fall race as the place to break two hours.

2. Strength train twice a week. This is something I've done successfully for about four weeks now and I'd like to keep the momentum going. I know the added strength training will help even out some of my many muscle imbalances and should make me a stronger, faster, less injury-prone runner. I'd like to keep up my two-a-days throughout the rest of this training cycle and carry them over into training plans for the spring and the fall.

There you have them, my two big goals for 2011. I will be tracking my progress here and in my paper running log with hope that more dedicated tracking will help me more easily identify areas where things work well and areas where I could use some improvement.

What are your goals for the New Year?