Nothing Else Matters
A guide on how to achieve your goals in 2026 taken from years of Marathon Training
The festive booze has been drunk (not that there was much), the cakes, crisps and box of celebrations have been eaten and enjoyed. It's the first Monday in January and the focus turns to my goals for 2026.
Nothing. Else. Matters.
Since I ran my first marathon in 1998, the first Monday in January has always been significant for me. My first was in London, which is 16 weeks out from the start of the year and long enough for most people to train in order to run 26.2 miles by the end of April.
I've run a marathon almost every year since 1998, in London, Paris, Edinburgh and found the first Monday in January a convenient time to start training, start the year afresh. It enabled me to enjoy the festive season, all the drinks, all the goodies safe in the knowledge that once the first Monday in January came, my focus would switch to marathon training and everything else would disappear, wouldn't even be on my radar for at least 4 months.
If you'd told me I could easily ignore snacks and nights out for 4 months before I started training for that first marathon, I wouldn't have believed you. Here's how you can do this.
Set A Really Big Goal
The first step is to set a really big goal for the first 4-5 months. Something that's at the edge of your capabilities but it'll take a lot of work and will require you to get out of your comfort zone to accomplish.
This can be a marathon or something that's meaningful to you that the thought of it excites you and scares you at the same time. I'd try and stay away from performance related goals like losing 3 stone, running a certain distance in a certain time etc because that's more likely to add unnecessary stress and become demotivating, make you feel like a failure if you don't achieve it.
Focus on the event, the distance, the things you want to do when you're fitter or lighter and the metrics will take care of themselves.
Focus On The Process, NOT The Outcome
Once you've set the goal, forget about it and start planning the journey to get there. When you sign up for a marathon, you're not going to be doing it for another 4 months so forget it and start planning how you're going to get there.
This doesn't mean that you need to throw the kitchen sink at it, like join a gym or go on a diet. What you're really going to be doing is creating a series of positive habits that will ultimately lead you to your goal.
The most important factors at the outset are consistency, frequency, easiness to do and the big one, enjoyment. While the goal needs to be hard, the steps to get there don't. Well, not to begin with anyway.
Think of it as creating a new routine for yourself. Think about setting aside 20-30 minutes a day to exercise, when you feel the most energised and perhaps start by going walking or if you are training for a marathon, walk one day, run the next. It's also useful to get into the routine of getting up at the same time every day, go to bed at the same time, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same times.
The first week might be a challenge but by the second week, you'll already feel like you're getting into a rhythm. You want it to feel easy so try not to add in too many things straight away or you won't do it.
Practice, Fail, Adapt, Repeat
"Be Stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods" - Jeremy Burrows
One of the biggest threats to achieving your goals is likely to be trying to follow the perfect plan. It doesn't exist. It's easy to find a preset plan off an app, off the internet or cherry pick the best sessions from a few plans but it rarely works out the way you want it to.
We humans are unpredictable and there's always something that's likely to get in our way. Trying to play catch up is more likely to lead us in the wrong direction than get us back on track.
The best way, in my opinion, is to start with a base plan that's easy to follow, review regularly as to what's working, what isn't, what needs to change in order to keep you progressing and keep it interesting.
That's essentially how I design every training plan I create. It's not so much about the plan but how the person responds to it. We start with something that's easy for them to fit in, review what's working well, what they struggle with, what adjustments we need to make to keep them moving forwards. In reality, we learn more from failure than we do in success.
Quite often, the things that make the biggest difference for my clients are totally different from anything we could have thought about at the start. Sometimes, that includes the goal, where the eventual goal ends up being way bigger than the dream at the beginning!
To conclude, set yourself a really big goal, a big challenge for yourself that will take a good amount of time to accomplish. Focus on the journey, continually learn so that you can grow and it's not so much about the goal but the person you become as a result of that process.
What's your dream for this year? The dream that you're not quite confident of telling anyone about? What's the first step you can take today that will begin the journey to get there?
If you can dream it and believe in it, you can most certainly achieve it. Everything IS possible!
