This year, I’m keeping my mouth shut.

Most self-help advice tells you to share your goals with everyone. The idea is to make yourself accountable to others.

Man, I’m sick of being accountable to others.

I have to be accountable to my family and in my job. There are deadlines to meet, bills to pay, chores to be done. Every day begins with a long list of to-dos. I accept that, but it doesn’t mean I want the same pressure in my outdoor life. I want to be accountable to myself, and myself alone. I want to be able to change my goals without explanation. I want to keep it simple.

And there’s new evidence that telling others about your goals makes you less likely to reach them. Just telling other people about your goals, it seems, gives you almost as much of an ego boost as actually achieving them.

So I’ll still be running, hiking and writing, but I won’t be boring you much with my long-term goals.

Life’s too short and this stuff, above all else, should be fun. Here’s to an outstanding 2012.

The #1000Words series highlights the images we’ve captured on the trail that tell a story that resonates with us.  As the saying goes “A picture’s worth a thousand words” and we believe it.  Share your images in the comments or on Twitter using the hashtag #1000Words.

You can find his entry here.

Here’s mine:

Last year, the boy and I climbed Mt. Washington on one of the sunniest days of the season. Separately, we each counted scaling New England’s highest peak as a summer goal. That we were able to do it together, as a team, was a blessing.

I was happy enough to be able to reach the top in strong fashion, after not being able to hike a mile a few years earlier. A far greater joy, however, was seeing my son touch the summit sign. The boy was in elementary school when we started hiking together, and our relationship was strengthened by our time together in the woods. Later this year he’ll head for college and our lives will change. I knew that Mt. Washington hike was special when it was happening, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it was one of the best days of my life.

The picture itself isn’t anything great. Thousands of people climb Mt. Washington and thousands more arrive by car or train, and they all pose for the same shot.

For the boy and me, however, it triggers a memory of a great day. And it turned into my favorite Christmas gift when my son had it mounted in glass and turned into a paperweight. It has a special spot in my office; whenever I’m feeling stressed, angry or simply off, I can take a look at the photo and trigger a memory. Suddenly, I’m in a happier place.

Jan. 1: First run of 2012, 12.5 miles on the trails through Willowdale State Forest.

  New Year’s Day–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

– Kobayashi Issa

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.” — Joseph Campbell

Thanks to Trail Sherpa for tipping me off to the video and my friends at Following Atticus for reminding me about the Campbell quote. The video comes from Coachingendurance.com.

Running and the undead were on my mind Saturday, when the boy and I spent the evening catching up on our favorite TV show about the coming zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the AMC series follows a rag-tag group of survivors trying to stay un-undead as they travel through muggy, zombie-ravaged Georgia in search of a safe haven. People die horribly — they’re either eaten alive, or they become zombies themselves. Killing a zombie is a particularly gooey process.

Survival on The Walking Dead is a vicious business. In the last episode we watched, one of the show’s protagonists, Shane, was one of two guys surrounded by hungry zombies in an abandoned high school. Shane is a hunky sheriff’s deputy who seems to find plenty of time for pec and ab work (and, apparently, chest-shaving) between dodging and killing zombies. The guy he was trapped with, Otis, is a sweaty, obese redneck who can barely manage a flight of stairs without risking a cardiac event. (I found myself critiquing Otis’ running form during a particularly long chase down the high school hallway. He overpronates terribly.)

You can guess how it turns out. The pair was being chased by zombies, and fat ol’ Otis, carrying much-needed medical equipment, was slowing things down. He was doomed to be eaten. Instead of heroically pulling Otis to safety, Shane shot him in the leg and took the equipment. Shane got away and Otis was redneck tartare.

The moral of the story? If you’re fat and the zombies come, you’re dead. If the zombies don’t kill you, your friends will. So you better be able to run. That’s what pushes me to climb a more challenging mountain, pick up the pace during a sluggish run, or put in an extra two miles at the end of a long loop. 5k PRs come and go; once you’re undead, you’re undead forever.

I’m confident years of hiking and my recent conversion to trail and mountain running will allow me to stay ahead of the undead, even if I have a belly like Otis. Unless the boy shoots me and leaves me for dead.

Who do you think is going to survive this chase? Otis should have done a few more hill repeats. Photo by Gene Page/AMC

Coming out of the mud pit at the end of the Mountain Epic. I did a face plant halfway through and must have swallowed about a half gallon of water...

Want to to climb a mountain the fast way and see some foliage? Is your idea of a good time extended dry heaves at the summit before a knee-jarring descent to the valley, followed by a face-down trip through a very warm, very syrupy mud pit?

Then I have the event for you.

On Oct. 9 I ran my first mountain race in more than 20 years. The Mountain Epic goes up, then down the slopes of the Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry, Maine. It was everything I thought it would be: exhausting, painful and, thanks to the communal mud pit at the end, almost certainly unsanitary.

It was also a blast. I got myself out of my usual running/hiking comfort zone and tried something I wouldn’t have dared attempt a year ago. (A year ago I couldn’t run a half mile, let alone four miles up and down a mountain.) I met up with some friends I hadn’t seen in years, and I tooled through Bethel, Maine, one of the towns of my childhood. And I drank plenty of recovery beer.

Six months ago, personal trainer Drew Manning stopped working out and began eating like a pig normal American so he could better relate to his clients’ struggles with obesity. As you can see from the time-lapse video above, he put on 70 pounds; you can watch as his six pack turns into a keg. He must have very understanding wife.

Manning’s almost at the turnaround point; next week he’ll start trying to lose it all again. To me, that will be the interesting part. It was funny watching as he tries to eat a full bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken — you can almost hear his heart sobbing. But it’s easy to gain weight. Taking it off is tough. Watching Manning try to take it off will be instructive. It’s a brave experiment.

And I wish I’d thought of this about 20 years ago — I could have told people I was putting on the pounds for a special project, not because I love beer, burgers, ice cream, bad TV and long naps…

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As much as I agree with the adage “It’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get back up,” it should be noted that it’s much less painful not to fall in the first place.

Weight training is touted as the cure for many ills. But if the goal is to lose belly fat, aerobic exercise is the only way to go, exercise scientists say …
… “Resistance training is a very good way to increase lean muscle,” said Cris Slentz, an exercise physiologist at Duke who led the study.. “And aerobic exercise isn’t.” But if the goal is to lose fat, then aerobic exercise is the ticket, he said.

Jogging fights beer belly fat. Your results, however, may vary.

That’s good news. Lifting weights is the most boring of all exercises. I have enough chores in my life; when I exercise, I like to have fun. That’s why I run and hike. Nothing else.

But losing weight is a chore, too. That’s why I’ve stopped obsessing about it. If I eat better, it’s because I want to run and hike faster.

I don’t run to lose weight. I run (and hike) because I enjoy it, even when it hurts. Every day I’m thankful for the chance to run or hike, and every day I kick myself for not getting back into it sooner.

I spent way to much of my adult life trying to lose weight before I tried physically demanding things like running and hiking. I was an idiot. My advice: Don’t wait for the perfect time to challenge yourself. There’s no such thing as a perfect time. Do it now.

The sweet irony? Once I stopped trying to lose weight, I started to lose weight. I’m down 35 pounds from January, and about 70 pounds since I started serious hiking three years ago. And the weight is still coming off, apparently.

So keep an eye out for my new book, “The Zero Percent Solution: How to lose weight by not giving a shit.”

Irene is working its way up the Atlantic seaboard and, if the increasingly excited TV weathermen are to be believed, we all may die in a watery hail of debris Sunday. The storm is still three days away and we’re being told to lay in enough supplies to feed the Donner party.

The good thing is, we’re prepared. And I bet most other hikers are, too. Everything we need is already stashed in the basement. Or, if you’re as lazy as I am, you never bothered to take it out of your pack after your last hike.

Food? Check — there’s plenty of jerky, trail mix and Swedish fish in the house. Water? If we run out of the important hiking fluids (Gatorade and beer), there are two water filters ready to pick up the slack. Lights? We have headlamps, camp lights, flashlights and enough batteries to power a small village.

Heck, we can fry bacon over our camp stove and open a third bottle of wine with our Swiss Army knife.

Sounds kind of peaceful, actually.