Earlier this year, a friend and I agreed to apply to run a 10K race, partly to motivate ourselves to get out and run. I’ve run a 5K event before and wanted to stretch myself a bit more. My friend applied for an early April race which I felt didn’t give me enough training time to be sure of running the whole distance. I wanted longer to train so started to look at May races. In fact I did not apply for a May race and I have only just started to train.

If I had turned up for the April event, I would have been training since February. I would now be fitter. I might not have run the whole 10K run in April, maybe I would have walked some of the route. Yet, given that my goal is to get fit, or fitter, rather than have an impressive time for the event, that wouldn’t have mattered.

I don’t think of myself as perfectionist, yet my desire to make a ‘proper’ go of the event got in the way of my real goal – to get fit. Continue reading →