Do You Need a Deadline to Get Fit?

Marathons, Hyrox races, twelve-week transformations and other big lofty goals — they all work, brilliantly, for a while. The question is what happens to your training once the date's passed.

You feel like you need a reason. Something to actually get you moving, because willpower on its own hasn't been cutting it. So you pick a lofty goal — the marathon. You sign up. Sixteen weeks of early alarms, sore legs, actual discipline. Race day comes, you finish, there's a medal and a photo and a genuinely proud moment.

Six weeks later, the trainers are by the door and haven't moved.

This isn't a failure of willpower. It's what tends to happen when the goal was the motivation. Once it's achieved, the reason to keep going goes with it.

I've seen this pattern in myself. Growing up training in martial arts, the black belt was the prize. Everything pointed towards it — grading after grading, all building to one moment.

But was the goal ever really the belt? Or was it to become someone slightly different — someone who saw themselves differently? Because the black belt isn't the finish line. It's meant to be the entry point to serious training, not the end of it. And yet it's amazing how often it works exactly like an end. If the belt was the whole point, motivation tends to fall off a cliff the moment it's earned."

None of that makes the marathon or big challenges pointless. Putting yourself through something hard, on purpose, teaches you something a comfortable week never will. You find out what you do when it's raining and you're tired and nobody's watching. That's real, and it's worth having. The question isn't whether the challenge was worthwhile — it's whether it was ever meant to be the whole plan.

For a lot of people these events aren't really the point — it's a proxy. What they're actually after is more energy on a Wednesday evening. Getting dressed in the morning and feeling confident in how they look. Not being the parent watching from the sidelines. But that's more nuanced and doesn't fit neatly onto a race bib, so the deadline stands in for it instead.

It's not that you never need a big challenge again — it just means it's not a problem if you don't.

There's a piece of psychology called self-determination theory that's genuinely useful here. It says people sustain a behaviour, long term, when three things are in place:

Autonomy — they chose to do it. Nobody's pushing or pressuring them into it; they actually want to be there. Competence — they can see themselves getting better at it, even in small ways. Relatedness — they feel some sense of connection while doing it. To feel seen and understood.

Side note on relatedness: it's easy to treat as a nice-to-have, but it often ends up doing more work than people expect. It's a large part of why CrossFit built such a loyal following in its early years, and why Hyrox is doing something similar now — shared effort in a room, everyone finishing wrecked together, has a pull that a solo treadmill session can't quite match. Bodybuilders often bypass a bigger corporate gym in favour of smaller, lesser-known lifting gyms, purely for the community. Runners join clubs. Heck, you can even find Reddit groups dedicated to calisthenics training, where people share tips and geek out together. Sometimes it's a whole group. Sometimes it's just one training partner you see once a fortnight — and that's still enough.

Miss one of these three levers and things get fragile. Force yourself to train because you think you "should," and the first bad week gives you a perfect excuse to stop. Train with no sense of progress and watch adherence flatline. Remove community and environment, and everything gets that little bit harder.

None of this needs a big event to exist. You can have autonomy, competence and connection with or without a big goal on the calendar. The lofty goal isn't where these three things live — it's just one place you might find them.

Use a big goal if it helps you start. Just don't assume you need one running in the background permanently to justify showing up. Sometimes the version of you that keeps going is the one who quietly worked out why — not the one still waiting for the next big goal to nudge them along.

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P.S. — I'd genuinely like to know: was there ever a season where you kept training with no event on the calendar, just because it had become part of how you lived? What kept it going? Thanks,

Jamie