Runstreak

A ‘runstreak’ is a continuous period of running every day. If you miss a day then your run streak is at an end.

Late in February, on a whim, I decided I would give it a bash, and run every day in March. Not sure why, maybe it was following @mrafletch on Twitter (he’s currently on day 289 of his runstreak), maybe I wanted to shake things up a little on the running front – who knows.

Anyway, off I went. I set myself a minimum daily mileage of 2 miles and started running every day. I thought it would be pretty simple – 2 miles, 15 – 18 minutes, not a great deal to carve out in a day. Mostly it has been easy, but there are challenging days – early start, long day at work, late finish, kids to bed, dinner at 9pm and then having to think about fitting in a run (on a full stomach).

Yesterday for example, I got up at 3:45am to get to Logan Airport, Boston for a 6:30 flight to Chicago, spent the day with customers and managed to fit in a short run at the airport before the late flight back. Had I not taken my running kit with me, I’d have struggled to get motivated to head out at 11:30pm after a long day. As an aside, I’m thinking of getting some running shoes that are easier to travel with – maybe a pair of Five Fingers ?

It’s only been a couple of weeks so far, but here’s a few tips that I’ve learned and that might help you.

• Reduce your mileage for the first few weeks – I pulled back by 20% on week 2 and will do on week 4 also.
• Reduce your pace for the first couple of weeks – I found myself wanting to run fast because some of the runs were much shorter than usual, you really have to hold back sometimes and think about the next day.
• Rest days – you need to work out what a rest day is (in terms of mileage and pace) and make sure you fit them in, more to start with, gradually dropping some as you get used to it.
• Timing – I found this critical to enabling me to continue training hard/long. You can have longer breaks / recovery time if you time things right – I’ll do a long run or speed session early on one day and then do a ‘rest day run’ late the following day, giving me a good 32-36 hours of recovery in-between

How’s it been ? Well so far I’m really enjoying it, my legs feel solid and not too fatigued, I’m still able to train at the level I want, and I really think it’s helping me get more consistency with my overall training and helping me get stronger.

What happens at the end of March ? Hmm, I’ve not really decided yet, I am enjoying this, so I may carry things on – the big test will be the Compton 40 mile challenge (7th April), will I be able to run the day after it ? I’ll let you know…