Facing Challenges Successfully

I'm just answering the question about how do you motivate yourself to face these challenges and this is not something I generally find too difficult, I mean there have been times when I've let myself get unfit and overweight but I think once I have a target and I know how I've got to get to that target and a half marathon is quite a good target to have then because you know you have a really quite well prescribed build-up to allow yourself to get to it and not completely keel over when you're trying to attempt it. And so I motivate myself to face the challenge of the half marathon by mapping out a program for myself about three months ahead. Not really a written programme, but something in my head that basically is I've got to run four times a week and by the time I get to the actual event, I should have run a 12 miler or whatever it is, 18 or 19 k's exercise and progressively built myself up to those by doing an ever longer run every week once a week while at the same time doing some more aerobic and anaerobic exercises for the other three days that you choose to exercise in a week. So it's not something I found too hard to do, but I guess the only advice I'd give is that if you have a goal or something that you're determined to enjoy, then there has to be a kind of roadmap to get you to that point. And that's the way I approach it. There are other things that I'm looking forward to, obviously in the summer, you know, summer holidays, probably going be working through the European summer this year but then hopefully spending some time in the UK from East Africa in late August early September when we need to take on a bit of a project with our house which we own in Dorset. So I think the best advice I can give is that you know you just break your challenge or your approach to your challenge, roadmap to the challenge, whichever metaphor you want to use, into bite-sized chunks and then keep a very clear focus on making sure you achieve those bite-sized chunks week on week for about 12 weeks before the actual event. It might be less depending on what your challenge is but that's my approach.