I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

How a person can feel so behind schedule for the year’s goals after only the month of February, I don’t know. Yet I do.

Some of it I can chalk up to over-optimism about the COVID-19 restrictions lifting and more things becoming possible again. Finding a new hobby or volunteer activity makes a lot more sense when you can easily interact with strangers and meet new groups of people, for example.

Other things just haven’t come to fruition due to extenuating factors in other life facets.

And in yet other areas, I need to rebalance my time expenditure to ensure I give the objectives enough space to develop.

However, to focus on the positive, I can express a genuine go-me feeling when it comes to my exercise and fitness goals for 2021.

The year has barely started, so I can’t give myself too many kudos. However, I feel good about what I put down on my plan for the year, good about how well I’m sticking with the program, and good about the early-stage results.

A little context may help.

To begin, for most of my goal-setting years, I’ve easily accomplished my exercise objectives. Typically, I’ve even exceeded them.

However, I’ve always tended to get overly rigid with my exercise programming. I would focus on miles run, cardio and strength workouts accomplished, races and competitions completed.

I enjoyed my workouts, but I admit that I often approached them as a chore. They needed to get done. I had to check them off the list.

And even when I enjoyed them, the workouts often left me somehow rougher at the end of the day, week, or month—rather than more energized. After several years, I developed a few nagging injuries and what I’d call a carapace of overall stiffness. Yes, like the shell of a crustacean. That kind of carapace.

In years of overachieving on my exercise goals, I’d understretched, overly strengthened certain muscle groups, pushed my body too hard in certain ways and not hard enough in others, and took all the fun out of exercising entirely.

Go me.

This year, I set a goal around exercising every day—but in rediscovering the fun and the play in moving my body. My exercise goals include variety in the types of workouts I do, variety in their settings and locations, and variety in their focus areas. I want to enjoy working out and to feel better overall from working out, rather than worse.

I want my exercising to enable a higher quality of life and vivacity—rather than the opposite.

And by golly, after a few months of approaching exercise like challenging play and varying my focus between types of exercise and types of goals for exercise, I feel stronger and more fluid and more flexible in many ways than I can remember having felt in a very, very long time (if ever). I feel more alert and vivacious as well. I have more energy, rather than less.

I’ll call that motivation to keep going. As is trying a new type of exercise and laughing at what’s harder than expected and finding joy in doing better at it when I give it a second go.

We all need more laughter and more fun in our lives. Can we ever have enough?