Dan Donohue, of Fitness Formation, writes about committing to a challenge

Committing to a cause should help to provide you with some motivation to get on with what you actually need to do to get ready for said commitment.

Whether you pay for it, whether you raise money for it or even better, for others, when you invest money into kit, equipment and travel and most importantly of all, the realisation that you’ll have to invest your most sacred commodity, your time.

All of these are just some of the elements involved in preparing for an event, a race or in order to hit a goal.

In last week’s column, we opened with a few of my personal findings of training for events over the last 18 months or so and we’ll round it off here, in this weeks column.

Training is play time.

Not necessarily always fun, but an opportune time to find what works and what doesn’t.

Use the weeks and months of training time to test your kit, to play around with supplementation, hydration and eating and drinking patterns.

Getting to event day having used your kit, your equipment, your supplements, refined your food intake and tolerances and tweeked your hydration strategy will leave you with far less to consider once you cross the start line.

Oh, and don’t be a novice and use completely new nutrition brands/supplements before you head out on your biggest training run/session.

Trust me, you don’t want the gory details on that one.

Just take my word for it.

What sense of accomplishment will you have on completion or the achievement of reaching your goal?

This is a pretty important question, for the very simple reason of the fact that it has to be something that will have a profound effect on said accomplishment.

I’ve seen time and time again, tears flow after the completion of an obstacle race because that individual has beaten their fear of heights, their fear of confined space or their fear of water.

I’ve seen tears of happiness after the completion of a half-marathon due to the fact that not many months ago, that same person was in a wheelchair after spending the previous weeks in a coma.

I’ve been side by side with individuals pushing through hugely debilitating injury to complete 32-mile adventure races because they are running in the memory of a lost loved one.

Whatever it is that you are setting out to achieve, it absolutely has to mean something to you.

Maybe not in the extreme circumstances of some of the above, but it has to have some relevance to you as an individual, even if it’s simply for the pure joy of it and

the fact that it makes you happy.

Have fun.

Enjoy the process of preparation for the event or the cause that you’ve now committed yourself to because whether you like it or not, that day is coming and when it does, you’ll need to be ready.

There are far worse things going on in the world right now. Good luck.