I’m hopeless without a deadline. Give me a task and tell me to take as long as I like and I’ll head for the beach. You might hear from me by Christmas, but don’t hold your breath.

I even encapsulated the idea as an epigram one time. The kind of thing you’d print on a T-shirt. “There is no job so big it cannot be run away from!”

Which explains why I see the attraction in a magazine article with a headline like, “Lose 5kg in three months!”

If you fail to put a target date, open-ended resolutions to lose weight tend to go out the window when you reach the office and discover it’s a colleague’s birthday and she brought a chocolate cake.

Not widely-known for making new friends, I somehow never met a chocolate cake I didn’t like (sounds like another T-shirt.)

It’s even possible to savour every delicious morsel of that chocolate cake and not feel a trace of guilt. Your resolution to lose weight is still valid... you just didn’t say by when.

You see how that works? Lawyers make whole careers out of such shenanigans. They call them loopholes and drive trucks through them.

Personally, I think there’s a strong case to be made for reincarnation, so I’m taking postponement to extremes. As an uber-procrastinator I’m already compiling a To Do list of things I’ll get to next time around. One life’s too short...

All of which explains how the late-night vow “must get a bit fitter” tends to waver when the alarm screeches at 6.00 a.m. Without a deadline, the words, “I’ll start tomorrow” just roll off the tongue at such times.

Hence Walkathon II next February.

Think of it like suddenly gaining a guilty conscience. The ability to effortlessly postpone your training comes up against a sudden dose of reality. Can’t do it any more. Got a deadline! (February 27, 2011). Pesky thing, but if you’re like me, you know you need it to get anything done.

I published the attached schedule last year, designed to get someone who can walk for 20 minutes to where they can safely cover 21.1 km by Malta Marathon day. It worked so well that over 200 new participants showed up on the day. Some of them are still walking... if you know what I mean.

Anyway, if you happen to know someone who followed it, and/or you wish to do the same, this schedule’s for you. It lasts 24 weeks and begins next week.

If you completed the Walkathon last year and are interested to know what to do this year to raise your fitness still higher (without becoming a jogger), be sure to read the articles in the coming weeks.

For now, marathon articles will only appear every second Saturday. From November, the articles will begin to appear each Saturday.

Until next time, enjoy your training.