Sparkie's rundiary

The World Double Decathlon Championships have been a goal of mine since mid-2003, when I came across them by accident on the Net. A combination of injury and lack of funds ruled out having a crack at them in 2005 (won by Australian David Purdon), but as good fortune would have it, they are in Australia this year, and a number of factors in my life mean that there will never be a better time to focus on this goal.

However, with 10 months of hard training and sacrifice ahead of me, it's time to get something a bit more concrete in place than "training for the World Double Decathlon Championships". A number of possible goals might be:
* go to the World Champs (only a bus ride away)
* compete in the World Champs (I can pull out after the first event)
* finish the World Champs (that's more like it, but I could do that right now, provided I run slowly enough)

Obviously something bigger and more specific is needed. What about winning the World Champs? A challenging and potentially attainable goal, but it puts the focus on things outside my control - who turns up. There are a few competitors in the past that achieved performances I have no chance of matching - Kip Janvrin's 14,000+ point world record the most notable example.

Nope, the only thing I can focus on is my own performances, and so I sat down and drew up a list of what I thought I was capable of doing. With a bit of juggling, a nice round number of 12,500 points came out, and that has become my mantra for the year.

Unless you have a well-worn spreadsheet that calculates these things (as I do), this number if fairly meaningless. And unless you have a database of the top 200 all-time performances in this event (as I do), it's relative merit is also unclear. So let me enlighten you on what I have signed myself up for:
* 12,500 points would rank as the 10th highest score ever
* 12,500 points would have won 18 of the past 24 world championships held
* 12,500 points is over 400 points higher than the current Australian record

That's the good news. The bad news is:
* 12,500 points is 2587 points more than I am capable of on current form
* 12,500 points is 898 points more than my all-time PBs stacked on top of each other
* 12,500 points involves me achieveing PBs in 12 out of 20 events

So, in short, 12,500 points is a fairly ambitous goal!

But I think it is realistic, and the only way it will be is if I set me sights on it, and train accordingly. My targets for each event are now listed on the sidebar, and none of them is particularly unachieveable - OK 3.6m for the pole vault is pretty daunting, but that is only 1 cm every 2.5 days between now and October. Some of the targets I could hit right now (everything from 800m upwards), others seem a world away right now (discus and hammer throw I'm talking to you). However, I will never do the work to run 18 seconds for 110m hurdles, unless I make a specific point of aiming for it.

So I have now gone very public with my intentions, and have very specific criteria to judge my performances and progress against. 12,500 points is not a certainty - it wouldn't be worth aiming for if it was (10,000 points would make a better round number in that case). But it is a goal that excites me and focuses me, and removes any doubt in my mind about why I am training, and what I have to do each day when I get out of bed.