With the Tour de France coming up in July, you can be sure that a lot of goals set over the last year will be coming to fruition. For each cyclist you’ve heard of (assuming you’ve heard of any) there will be hundreds who have been focusing on training for this event every day for the last year or longer.

Almost all of them know that they can’t be the winner, not even of an individual stage, but setting goals isn’t about having to win at everything. Setting the right level of goal is an art in itself, aiming at something that will require real effort and drive to deliver, but not be so out of reach that self-belief becoming impossible.

It’s almost impossible to think of the Tour de France without thinking of Lance Armstrong, the US cyclist who has won the Tour de France a record 7 times. He contracted cancer in the 1990s, and famously fought back, regained his fitness and went on to win the titles. Interestingly, he hadn’t won a single Tour de France before having cancer.

He is riding again this year as a professional cyclist, but this time more to promote his cancer charity livestrong.org (it has  a fantastic website full of inspiring articles).

His is a remarkable story, and if you haven’t read about it, then go and do so straight away – it will give you huge encouragement to go out and achieve your own goals.