A year built as a challenge a month is a training structure before it is an adventure. Stacking events that demand different things — stair climbing, river paddling, open-water swimming, long indoor rowing, mountain running with navigation — forces a kind of preparation a single goal race never does: no training block can be long, nothing can be properly peaked for, and recovery has to be planned as carefully as the work.

What makes such a year worth reading about afterwards is the failure modes rather than the finishes. Cold water, altitude, night navigation and a hot indoor row break an athlete in completely different ways, and an endurance calendar of this kind is really an experiment in how quickly a body can be re-taught. The calendar below is kept as the year was set out, month by month, on this domain.