Happy New Year!

Another year is over, so it’s a time to reflect on the year that has just past and to look forward to the new year ahead.

In terms of the year just past, 2008 has been an eventful year for me in two key areas; my working life and my education. With regards to my working life, I had a massive change at the end of June when I decided it was time that I left my role as a Director of a services company and set up on my own as a Business Consultant. I had been with Merlin for 12½ years and I felt that the time was right for a change. The following 6 months have been challenging, fun, nerve wracking, educational and much more but I wouldn’t change it at all and on this front I am excited about the opportunities that I will hopefully get in 2009.

On the education front, I managed to complete my Open University degree – getting notification in August that I had passed my last course and that I can now have BSc after my name! Something I am very pleased to have done; in fact it’s something that I still cannot believe that I have achieved. I am looking forward to the graduation ceremony that will take place sometime in June this year.

In terms of looking to the year ahead, I have a lot of goals in mind, especially relating to my running. I am of course training for the London Marathon and hope that on the 22nd April that I will successfully achieve my aim of running in my 4th London Marathon. I also have more general running aims for 2009, as I feel that I need to get myself back into a regular running routine, like I had between 2000 and 2005. I have lapsed considerably with my running since completing the London Marathon in 2005, and I would now like to get myself back on track and start to build up my running fitness that will bring me up to fitness levels that I saw a few years back; I miss this a lot. In order to do this I do need to have some fixed targets, so the London Marathon in April is my first and over the course of the next few weeks I will be looking at adding a few more races to my schedule and who knows I may even try to run another marathon later in the year. I am leaving this one open at the moment, but I will let you know as soon as I decide!

I have documented my ten New Years Resolutions here, not that anyone else will be that interested, but for me it is a way of keeping myself focused on what I have set as targets for myself in 2009 and then this time next year I will be able to reflect and see how well I did!

Happy New Year everyone – and happy running!