My running carrot

I just finished reading The Way of the Runner: A Journey into the Fabled World of Japanese Running by English journalist Adharanand Finn.

He travels to Japan and visits a monastery where monks run a thousand marathons in a thousand days in search of spiritual enlightenment; and trains with university and corporate teams who compete in the lucrative and prestigious ekiden - a long distance run covered by a team rather than an individual.

He surmises that the team environment of the ekiden encourages competitors to beyond what they could as an individual, and vows to test this theory. But...

The "consolation" prize

My goal for the last couple of years has been to qualify for the UTMB.

It took me a while to out myself on this goal and when I did, I admitted to being fairly fearful about it. There was a good reason for that. It was a lofty one and in the end, it turned out I'd bitten off more than I could chew. I failed to finish my final qualifying race, so came up short.

I've been awarded a consolation prize though.

2015 goals... 2016 goals... it's all the same to me.

It's that time of the year when all good athletes set their physical goals for the year.

I could just repost my "Goals for 2015" post as "Goals for 20156". I didn't achieve my main running goal last year so it's still good to go.

But it seems I didn't write a post about my goals last year. There are probably two reasons for this.