When you think you are done, you can al­ways do one more. There is no prize at the end; there is on­ly fin­ish­ing. That’s when you dis­cov­er what tru­ly mo­ti­vates peo­ple—when the goal isn’t what you re­ceive, but what you con­tribute.

Last Sun­day (Jan­u­ary 18) was the 12th T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) Gold Foun­da­tion Marathon Chal­lenge - a 26.2-mile walk/ride from St Mary’s Freeport to Port of Spain (The Har­vard Club). It start­ed at 2 am.

The last de­ter­mined walk­er fin­ished at 11 am. I, my­self, com­plet­ed the jour­ney in eight hours. It was one mile at a time for 26.2 miles—the longest I have ever tak­en to fin­ish. In my case, just get­ting to the start was a vic­to­ry - as was fin­ish­ing.

​The Marathon Chal­lenge seeks to raise aware­ness and fund­ing for the TTOC Gold Foun­da­tion. Yet, there will al­ways be peo­ple who try to make you doubt your mis­sion.

​Re­cent­ly, un­der the rubric of “straight talk, bad man­ners,” some­one told me in no un­cer­tain man­ner that the Go­ing4Gold ini­tia­tive is one no “trained sport pro­fes­sion­al” will ever set Olympic gold as a per­for­mance stan­dard. They ar­gued that hat I was wrong when I did and I did se­ri­ous harm to T&T’s sport­ing psy­che.

Go­ing4Gold, pre­vi­ous­ly known as 10 Gold 24, is a na­tion­al call to ac­tion. It aims to bring to­geth­er all the com­po­nents of a high-per­for­mance en­vi­ron­ment and align them with the as­pi­ra­tions of Team TTO’s Olympic ath­letes.

It is de­signed to pro­vide sus­tained fi­nan­cial, tech­ni­cal, and wel­fare sup­port for Team TTO ath­letes aim­ing for Olympic suc­cess.

To pro­vide: Di­rect fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance for ath­letes to cov­er train­ing, prepa­ra­tion, and liv­ing ex­pens­es.

Medal Bonus In­cen­tives for ath­letes who achieve suc­cess on the in­ter­na­tion­al stage.

A path­way for the pub­lic and cor­po­rate sec­tor to sup­port the “Olympic dream” of ath­letes.

The idea is to pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ty for sus­tain­able sup­port for elite ath­letes be­yond a sin­gle Olympic cy­cle.

The in­ten­tion here isn’t to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive ex­pla­na­tion of Go­ing for Gold. A Google Uni­ver­si­ty search can yield more in­for­ma­tion.

On the point of set­ting big goals and do­ing se­ri­ous harm to the na­tion­al psy­che: con­sid­er a re­cent ar­ti­cle from cbc.ca fea­tur­ing leg­endary swim­ming coach Bob Bow­man. He is cur­rent­ly coach­ing Cana­di­an stand­out Sum­mer McIn­tosh on his pro team at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, whose goals in­clude win­ning five gold medals at the LA Olympics. It’s some­thing McIn­tosh has be­come very com­fort­able vo­cal­is­ing to her coach and many oth­ers.

“I think when you’re chas­ing some­thing that is as hard as get­ting five in­di­vid­ual gold medals at an Olympic Games, you have to be able to say it out loud and you have to be able to share that dream with your coach­es and peo­ple who are sur­round­ing you, be­cause it’s not go­ing to come easy,” McIn­tosh told cbc.ca.

“It’s some­thing that you have to de­vote your­self to every sin­gle day. Even say­ing it out loud to Coach Bow­man as well, I feel like it kind of makes it more re­al for me and of course, he’s been through some­one try­ing to get eight gold medals be­fore, so he knows what it takes to get there.”

And while win­ning gold medals is al­ways on her mind, McIn­tosh was al­so open to talk­ing about world records, such as the 200-me­tre but­ter­fly World record she’s been track­ing down and get­ting very close to break­ing.

Olympic-lev­el ath­letes set clear, mea­sur­able, and chal­leng­ing goals; do­ing so mo­ti­vates them to train hard­er and fo­cus on the process. In set­ting big goals, they ask them­selves what will it take? And go af­ter their goals.