About a year ago, I was in the locker room of the Austin YMCA when a group of regulars was chatting.

The Y was abnormally busy and one of the men declared he couldn’t wait for the New Year’s resolution folks to fall off so things went back to normal.

I thought of this when I ended up setting what could be seen as resolutions or just straightforward goals for the year in the early days of 2017.

I don’t like thinking of these as “resolutions.” The word carries too much weight in a weird way; it seems more firm and formal. I just set goals.

Resolutions are notoriously associated with failure, hence the men at the Y talking about resolution-makers falling off in a few months or even weeks.

In the last few years, I’ve just set simple goals for myself. They’re goals I follow throughout the year, but the new year is just a good time to reflect on it.

My big goal for 2017 is to run a half marathon. While this may seem like a big resolution, it’s actually just the next natural goal. My brother-in-law and I ran a 10-kilometer race last spring and a 10-mile run in the fall, so a half-marathon is the next step up. We basically agreed to do it after the 10-mile run and almost attempted it in the fall, but we just made it official late last year.

He threw out the idea of running a marathon this fall, and I told him I’d love to — the bug has been there for years — but I’m not going to make any guarantees based on the time commitment needed for training.

See to me, I’ve found “resolutions” or New Year’s goals, whatever you want to call them, to be simply a way of sharpening my focus and resetting your goals. It’s not a time to make lifestyle overhauls that are unsustainable.

So instead of aiming for an overhaul with a resolution, just aim to be a little better than you were yesterday.