Like many people who exercise often, I get asked ‘what are you training for?’. I think it’s normal for people to expect a single short answer - “Doing the half marathon in a few weeks” or “I’m off on a trek” but often there isn’t a specific event in mind. This got me thinking to all the reasons I train - and I say train rather than exercise because for me training is much broader than simple exercise. I’ve been a casual runner for about 15 years and I love my running but training for me means something bigger, it means doing exercises that I wouldn’t normally do, exercises I don’t necessarily enjoy or that I’m not very good at. It’s precisely by training those uncomfortable areas that I get the best results. So in a nutshell what am I training for? I’ll answer that at the end. Except for the first two, these in no particular order are the reasons I train: