It’s March 9^th – normally by now I’d have at least 80% of my races for the year booked in, or at the very least know exactly what races I plan to run and my goal for each. This year is different – I only have one 10k race in April, and that’s only in my calendar as I am a clinic instructor for the group – the rest of my year is wide open, and I plan to keep it that way.

Initially I told myself (and everyone that asked what my plans were for the year) that I’m still recovering from my Seawheeze injury, and I’ll book things in for later on in the year. But as time went on, there were no races close by that interested me, and I’m not a huge fan of race-cations now, given that the two I did last year ended in me being really ill with flu, or being so injured that I could barely walk on the ferry to get home.

So the weeks went by and I had no races booked in. Then, during one of my Instagram scrolling sessions, I came across a runner who said she hardly runs any races. I was like ‘Eh, you don’t run races?!?! WTH?!? What’s the point if you aren’t always pushing for a PB??’ – but the more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea of having a year free of races, well apart from the one I am running with my running group. It got me excited, actually, almost as excited as if I had booked a race.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am still going to run regularly in 2019 and I do still have running goals, but those goals aren’t going to be validated by one race, by one medal, or by one race day performance.  Some of my goals will be time and distance based, but will also heavily focus on having fun and being injury free. I’m so excited to see where 2019 will take me.

I’d love to know if you don’t run races, or have taken a period of time off from races – did you enjoy it or were you itching to get back to the adrenaline packed starting line?

Thanks for reading,

Gx

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