Avenue Magazine Calgary

Goals scare me. Self-help books and personal management tomes are so unnerving with their cult-like mind-control language instructing me to set milestones, track my progress and chant affirmations like a slavish robot.

I control my own destiny. I create my reality. What I believe, I can achieve. Just do it. Pass by the Sunday-morning mobs of Running Room joggers with their glazed-eye grins and matching jackets and you’ll see what I mean: goals are creepy.

Despite that, I love them. Ever since a painful divorce turned me into one of those glassy-eyed Running Room automatons, I’ve been bounding up the escalator of achievement. Running started out as a passion and a form of therapy. Five marathons and one Ironman triathlon later, I’m starting to wonder if I’m taking things too far — if I’m not trying to qualify for Boston, I don’t see the point. Exercising for health and enjoyment? What’s that?

I know I’m not alone. Calgarians love goals. We’re a young, vibrant, entrepreneurial city that likes to kick ass and take names later. And why not? Whether it’s losing the last 10 pounds or making the first $1 million, goals give us something to shoot for; something to lift us above status quo and into the realm of excellence.

However, there’s a real dark side to the endless pursuit of excellence at all costs: a goal obsession that can lead to health problems, from depression to anorexia to flat-out burnout. Are we reaching our potential, or just reaching our limits? And how would we know, anyway, when we don’t stop to smell the proverbial roses?

Marc Meunier’s goal, before he had even completed an Ironman, was to qualify for the World Ironman Championships in Kona, Hawaii — considered by many to be the crème de la crème of endurance sport. “I don’t know why,” says Meunier, a high school athletic director. “I just thought there might be a chance, and it motivated me.”

The gruelling race, comprised of a 3.86-kilometre swim, 180-km bike and 42.2-km run, takes anywhere from eight to 17 hours to complete. Meunier completed his first Ironman in August 2005 in Penticton, B.C., in just over 10 hours — within minutes of a qualifying spot. Driven, he went back for seconds, then thirds.

Six months before his second Ironman, Meunier’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. Galvanized by emotion, he stepped up his training and hardened his resolve. The world championships was a golden carrot dangling barely within reach. “I wanted my mom to see me qualify,” he says. Two weeks before the race in August 2006, she passed away. He raced anyway, but did not qualify.

When Meunier decided to go for it a third time, members of his training group began to worry he was using his Kona mission as a way to avoid dealing with grief. He ignored their concerns and kept training, finally qualifying for Kona at Ironman Coeur d’Alene in June 2008 — almost two years after his mom died — reaching his personal best: 9:54:03.

“You ask yourself if it’s healthy,” Meunier says. “To be honest, I don’t know. My Saturdays are eight-hour training days and there’s no one else out there. I know it’s not normal. Maybe I need to come to grips with it.” Meunier’s pursuit of perfection became a dilemma wrapped inside a paradox: the snake eating its own tail, the hunter becoming the prey.

But there seems to be a double standard when it comes to high standards. We don’t bat an eye when Michael Phelps trains for five hours a day. Lance Armstrong is called a hero; his races are fuelled by strenuous efficiency training and driven by personal tragedy. It’s when a regular Joe with a full-time job and a family pushes himself that we start to question his motivations and sanity.

Workaholics are rewarded with promotions and performance bonuses — until their health starts to suffer and they’re criticized for not taking care of themselves. Models and Hollywood actresses are expected to subscribe to slimming, trimming, hardcore raw-food or macrobiotic diets — but when your next-door neighbour follows suit, she’s a borderline wacko.

Andrea Giroux is a local documentary filmmaker preoccupied with food. “I’ve always been conscious about what I eat,” says Giroux, a mother of one. “I had allergies as a kid and developed irritable bowel syndrome later on. I learned to look at food as medicine.”

Conscious eating for the 29-year-old means eating a strict diet devoid of wheat, dairy and anything packaged or processed. Recently, she’s transitioned to a predominantly raw-food diet. Friends, family and even Giroux’s husband find her choice difficult to deal with, not knowing which foods or modes of preparation are “allowed.”

“If I was in my own little world, I would never feel weird,” Giroux says. “But when I see people’s reactions to my diet, I wonder.” Still, she’s not interested in making things easier for the sake of her diet. “When you know something, it’s hard to go back,” she says.

It’s also hard to tell whether Giroux is food-obsessed or making courageous, informed choices in a world increasingly placated by modern conveniences, placing her, like so many others, on a middle ground between healthy ideas and unhealthy obsessions.

Dr. Natasha Kutlesa is a registered psychologist whose clientele is split between elite athletes and women with eating disorders. “I look at it as a continuum,” Kutlesa says. “On the one side is healthy high standards and high performance. On the other end is negative perfectionism.”

Kutlesa chalks up the difference to a matter of intention. “It comes down to whether the goal is about a healthy pursuit of excellence or an unhealthy fear of failure,” she says. “It’s the difference between, ‘I am afraid to gain weight, so I’ll train for a marathon,’ and, ‘I want a healthy lifestyle
and I want to challenge myself to a marathon.’

“Rather than just checking things off the list, we need to really reflect on how our goals relate to our values. The movement should be toward inner work rather than external motivation.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Stephanie Mason thinks the inner/external conflict is a pervasive trend. “People become attached to external things to define them,” she says. “We’ve lost our connection to our internal self, our spirit or soul, which should be our first guide. We’ve externalized our sense of self-worth, which will never fill the soul and therefore people think: More is better. And they keep raising the bar.

“A lot of my practice consists of people who feel they haven’t met their goals,” Mason says. “They wanted to have their Masters by 28 and be married by 30. They’ve pulled these numbers out of the air and are disappointed in themselves because they think they’re behind.”

It’s a reflection of the Zeitgeist, she says. “We’re trying to maintain control in a chaotic society.”

The need for control and self-sufficiency is what got Juanita Ramirez into trouble. “I wanted to be independent and successful. I wanted to do it all on my own,” she says. Doing it on her own meant working full time in advertising while juggling several freelance design projects, rental properties and a part-time job serving tables. “At the peak of my insanity,” Ramirez says, she worked 80 to 90 hours per week.

Ramirez became so obsessed with making enough money for early retirement, she lost sight of the fact that she might not be around to enjoy it. “I always like to have Plan A, Plan B and Plan Z,” she says. “I prepared for too much and didn’t live in the moment.”

Desperate to maintain control over her over-programmed life, Ramirez short-circuited: “I was like a machine. And the machine started to break down.” She became impatient and demanding. Health issues emerged — heart trouble, a lump in her breast and precancerous abnormalities — red flags warning the 38-year-old that she had gone too far. In response, Ramirez took a six-week leave from work and rewired her life. “I gave notice to my career,” she says.

Obsessive behaviour is an ageless affliction with contemporary symptoms. For many, goals have become like assignments. Tasks such as “Travel to Europe” and “Buy Vacation Property” are added to our personal Life List, which is supposed to add up to “Good Person” or “Fabulous Existence” — sacrifices be damned. People are racing toward a retreating horizon, so obsessed with achieving their goals they’ve lose sight of why they wanted to achieve them in the first place. To that, says Kutlesa, “I’ve never seen someone reach their unhealthy standards and feel fulfilled.”

Adds Mason: “This generation has never had to face survival at its base level. People who work with the earth or do manual labour are less depressed because they see the fruit of their efforts.” The result is a middle-class sense of meaning reduced to a vague and abstract haze of Wants and Needs.

“There’s a difference,” Mason says, “between having an obsession that controls you and making a commitment to something in terms of the process, not the end point. We are human beings, not human doings.”

The answer then is: Just do . . . nothing?

“We wear being busy like a badge of honour,” says certified professional life coach Cathy Yost. “If we’re busy, we must be getting somewhere. It actually is the opposite — it’s about being still. You’ll move forward more if you just stop and listen.”

Forward, backward, still. What’s really important, Yost says, is listening to our internal GPS system — intuition. Follow the directions, she says, and “everything will unfold in the right way and at the right time.”

The time is now when we’re striving for external gratification, casting about for meaning in how we look, what we’ve accomplished, even who and how we love — and being emptied rather that filled up by our goals. We’ll never be fulfilled until our achievements impact us on a spiritual level.

For me, it’s about surrendering the illusion of control and embracing the moment. It’s an organic flow, not a rigid system. It’s doing what feels good, not what looks good. It’s also about giving up the deadline and, in some cases, the finish line.