WITH six weeks to go, most half-marathon runners will be marking this week as the halfway point of their training.

Their legs are becoming accustomed to longer runs, but there are still some important markers to hit before race day.

To stay motivated, it’s time to truly tap into your reason behind running the race. Each training run is part of the jigsaw – therefore the better you understand your motivation the more you’ll get out of your runs, yourself and your experience.

Here are my top three ways to stay focused and do what’s necessary to earn that leaping lion-shaped medal.

1) Win every run. Every run is a race and every race an opportunity. Winning doesn’t mean coming first, it means owning that little slice of your life called ‘commitment’.

Every time you go out when you said you were going to, you get to claim another little victory against the resistance.

Think of each training run as a piece of the puzzle in their own right. They’re all standalone opportunities for growth and improvement.

2) Plug into your community. Running is an individual sport and it can be lonely. The experience of race day, with thousands of runners by your side, is the polar opposite of the many solo miles that go before it.

Connecting with a community of other adventurers on the same journey enables you to draw on some of the elevated energy created by this shared experience.

Whether it’s running with a buddy, joining a Facebook group or the Sweatshop Running Community, wherever you find a concentration of unified purpose you’ll find a rich well of motivation to tap into.

3) Go Statto. You can run by feel or you can run by the numbers. Although the ‘datafication’ of running risks removing some of the purity and freedom of the pursuit, tracking your stats does have several benefits.

Firstly, it gives you an idea of your likely race day performance and times to pace by, but more importantly it shows you in unequivocal terms how much you’re progressing.

And thanks to human nature, progress equals a motivation boost.