New Year, New Challenges

Happy New Year to you!
As one year finishes and another starts, many people are filled with optimism as they look forward to what lies ahead. New Year resolutions abound. New challenges are identified. New aims in life targeted. And athletes are no different - indeed, many of them will be even further ahead of the rest of us in their looking forward. Many won't have had the Christmas break that some of us have had, as routines will have continued throughout and alongside the festive season. Training for this new year will be planned. Competitions will have been identified as targets. Aims and goals for performance will have been set. And dreams will have been dreamed. 2010 is a big year for competition. In addition to all the annual competitions for each sport, there are a number of others this year: Vancouver and Whistler in Canada host the Winter Olympics in February and the Winter Paralympics in March; Doha, in Qatar, hosts the World Indoor Athletics Championships in March; South Africa hosts the FIFA World Cup in June and July; Guildford, in the south of England, hosts the Women's Rugby World Cup in August and September; and Delhi in India hosts the Commonwealth Games in October - to name but a few!
Last weekend, a number of track athletes laid some foundations for this year by competing in the Great Edinburgh International Cross Country; and it was good for me as Visiting Sports Chaplain at Loughborough University to watch several Loughbrough based athletes in action. I perhaps ought to add that I was in the warmth watching on TV whilst they were competing in a very cold and snowy Edinburgh!
I'm also beginning to make my own preparations for this new sporting year. Towards the end of last year I learned that I'd been selected as a chaplain for the Winter Paralympics. This was quite a surprise as numbers of accredited chaplains are small and I wasn't expecting to be selected at all. So fund-raising started in November, because virtually all such chaplaincy appointments are self-funding (as was Berlin last year), as did the search of accommodation, etc, etc. I'm also playing a major part in planning and providing the chaplaincy provision at the Women's Rugby World Cup, which thankfully is happening much closer to home.
So the blog has been redesigned and relaunched, and I'll be adding more news and updates on a regular basis from now on, including daily bulletins from the Paralympics in March (hopefully, technology resources permitting).