Here we have it, The Balanced Runner Community’s 2025 running goals in word cloud form. I input all the goals emailed to me by folks answering my email on January 12, 2025, and the more times a word appeared in the answers, the bigger it is in this runner-shaped word cloud of dreams. :-)
Obviously Run is the biggest, most common word. Marathon is also big though that includes a lot of people mentioning half marathons (you can see Half pretty big above Run). Over the past few years I’ve been seeing more people aiming for ultras, and it’s interesting to see marathons come back as the most common frame of reference.
5k is the other distance mentioned often enough to show up clearly (right on the runner’s butt, which is a nice coincidence). I thought I might see more shorter distances mentioned as well, so it was nice to have that confirmed. A number of people mentioned that after focusing on longer races for a few years, they were dropping down in distance to focus on speed.
Other words that show up pretty often were Ease, Without, Free, Fun, Being, Nature, Again, and Pain. Most often people wrote to me about what they wanted, but of course there were people who most wanted to get rid of certain things–specifically pain and injury. I hope to have the opportunity to help you folks with that this year!
Continue and Remain are also pretty big, as many people wrote that they liked how their running felt and wanted to maintain it even as they reached for new goals. That also made me really glad to see.
Do you see your goal here? Do you see any patterns I’ve missed? What are you aiming for in 2025? Please leave a comment and let me know!
And of course, if you haven’t yet tapped into all the help I can give you, jump into our free 1-week Mind Your Running Challenge to help you start shifting your form to meet the challenges you’ve chosen for this year. Sign up here: