As always appreciate your support as we embark on a big 2026.If you’d like to stay up to date with the fortnightly Substack’s where I share my thoughts on endurance training and racing - hit the link below and they’ll go straight to your email. Cos who doesn’t love another email!

It’s that time of year when New Year’s resolutions are either still going strong… or quietly slipping away. If you’re in the first camp, well done. If you’re not, this is your reminder that nothing is broken.

Despite the title, this isn’t some self-help article about reinventing yourself or making some dramatic change overnight. It’s about recognising where you are right now. If you managed to stay disciplined through the holiday period, great. If you leaned a little harder into the festivities than planned, that’s okay too. The message here is - you are where you are now and it’s going to be better to start today than tomorrow.

When starting back out, or actually, any time where I’m trying to build fitness, one of the biggest traps I see (and still fall into myself), is comparing current training to a previous version of fitness. That comparison can show up in early January just as easily as it can halfway through a big training block. The problem is the same: you’re measuring today’s work against a body, a mindset, and a context of a previous version of you.

Some days you’ll feel strong. Other days you won’t. That’s influenced not just by training load and fatigue levels, but also by sleep, stress, travel, work, family, life in general. None of that makes a session good or bad by default.

The key is learning to treat each session as a standalone effort.

I’ve recently been doing a slight variation of the same workout each week. These have been 1km efforts with small changes to the number of reps and recovery.

For me, this is good practice. If I catch myself thinking, “Ah, these weren’t quite as fast as last week,” I pause and consider the slight changes: the workout structure, wind, heat, terrain, or overall training load. At the end of the day, performance in an individual workout shouldn’t detract from the process of showing up and doing it. This is where consistency comes from and this is where gains are made. Bringing your “basement” higher over time is what matters. Instead of comparing yourself to the finest or freshest version of yourself, focus on where you’ve come from, and how these hard workouts feel now compared to coming out of an offseason.

So, when you get out for your next run or session, don’t ask, “Why don’t I feel as fit as I did last year?”
Ask, “Did I show up and execute today’s session well, given everything else going on?”

When you can do that consistently, without ego, without comparison, fitness takes care of itself.

I’m pleased to share that this article has been presented to you by Precision Fuel & Hydration. I’ve been working with the team at PF & H for the last 2.5 years and their attention to detail is super impressive. We’re constantly in comms around how to maximise my performance in training & race day, it truly feels like an “athlete-first” approach. If you’re keen to get an understanding of how to weave their products into your training & racing - check out their planner: PF & H Planner

If you have a business that you’d like to feature across the fortnightly Substack’s, please reach out direct to me via DM on Instagram. Would love to explore the possibility of having community members businesses in front of the Lessons from the Long Run community.