If you have known me a while, you’ll have maybe worked out that I’m a bit of a runner. If this is your first time coming across my content, firstly, welcome to the blog! Secondly, now you know that I’m a bit of a runner. If you have known me a while, you’ll know that I have just completed a challenge of running everyday for a year. If this is your first time coming across me, now you know that I’ve just completed a challenge of running everyday for a year.
Like most experiences and challenges that I have taken on in life, naturally, to help me process everything about it as well impart any knowledge gained to you all, I have written this article about what I found out during. It was upon reflection of what I’d achieved that I realised that I had actually picked up a thing or two.
In this blog, I’ll firstly let you know what actually inspired me to be crazy enough to take on such a challenge. From there, I’ll detail as to what the challenge for me entailed and what counted as a completed day followed up by things that I achieved during that time period aside from the challenge itself. Then we will get into the lessons learnt to share them with you so that you can either consider a challenge like this or inspire some thought into your current lifestyle and the excuses you may be using for inaction. Finally, I’ll round off with my final thoughts on the challenge, would I recommend it for someone else and plant a seed or two about what you could do yourself.
Enough of me rambling, let’s get into the real reason of why you’re here.
What Inspired Me
You’re likely wondering what it was that inspired me to suddenly take on this challenge. I’m certainly not adverse to a sporting challenge however, this one in particular was thanks to Hellah Sidibe‘s run streak that he has been on since May 2017. Though I’d followed him for a while, it was his conversation with Rich Roll discussing how he completed the task of running across the USA that really ignited the fire within in. I decided that I wanted to start my own streak of running everyday, see where it would take me, if I could do it and use it as a basis for training for the other crazy plans I have for the future.
What Was My Criteria
It was with that intention that I set the criteria and embarked on my journey, aiming for at least a year’s worth of running everyday. To ensure that a day counted within the streak, I wanted to set myself a minimum mileage that was achievable but still required some work to be put in:
- Run at least 2 miles
However, after just a few days, I tried to cheat myself and conducted a run at 0013 and was going to count it as the day before. This didn’t sit well with me so I set a second criteria to hold myself accountable to:
- The run had to be started within the 24 hour window of that day for it to count
This meant that a run on Strava (because if it’s not on Strava, does it really count?) would give a dot that day, so it was easy to see what had been achieved. Here’s an example of what I mean for those who aren’t in the know:
By the way, if you want to follow me on Strava, the link is here. You’ll be able to not only get an insight into my training (or lack of at times) consists of for the sports that I do as well follow the journey towards the bigger challenges I have.
What I Achieved During The Challenge
Unsurprisingly, during the challenge, I was able to to achieve a few other sporting feats. Some of them, I do put down to the challenge, as I explain later on in the blog and the others, were just feats that happened during that timeframe:
- Completed my first 100km race
- Gained my first Spartan Race Age Group podium
- Completed the David Goggins 4x4x48 challenge
- Managed to achieve a 1 hour 25 minutes 3 second half marathon PB
- 5km PB of 18 minutes 46 seconds
- Ran a total 1403.4 miles in that time, averaging at 3.84 miles a day
I’m sure there are more that I’m overlooking but these stand out to be my top 5 achievements during this time.
What Did I Learn During The Challenge
I’ve ran a lot in my life but never everyday for a year. With me going through this new experience, I was bound to learn something about myself and running. If I didn’t, this blog wouldn’t exist! Many of these lessons were about myself but they can be generalised so that they apply anyone, even to the point of it not just being about running but any sport or even any challenge that you take on.
Always Have Time
For me, this is the most important lesson not only for myself but for everyone. You always have time to fit something in. You can’t keep making the excuse of “I don’t have time” for your inaction. Apparently, we are “so busy” and “don’t have time” to do this, that or the other. From doing this challenge, I found out that is rubbish. It’s simply the fact that you aren’t prioritising correctly and using up valuable time with other activities that don’t have a tangible output. Either that or you aren’t efficient with your time, using that as an excuse.
Let me explain how I was able to fit it in and how I got creative to ensure that I got it done. For me to run 2 miles, it took me up to 20-25 minutes to change, run, change and then carry on with my day. That’s it. If you look properly, you will have 20-25 minutes in your day to be able to fit in your chosen activity. I know that sometimes it will be hard to find that time if you are particularly busy but that’s when you have to be creative.
Here are some example of how I was able to fit it in, whether they be simple or me having to get creative:
- Simply waking up 30 minutes earlier to go out and do my run
- During a full day of travelling back from a festival, though I could have gotten up earlier to do my run, I was able to substitute the tube journey across London to get my coach with a run carrying my 20kg of luggage. Yes, it was hard work but I got it done!
- Using a lunch break at work to get changed and get the run done. Sometimes, I would even do it in my work clothes!
- When the day hadn’t gone as planned and my social plans overran, I ran back home after saying goodbye instead of getting public transport
- Once I left a pub evening with friends for 15 minutes to get a quick run in. Well, people go outside for a cigarette, why can’t I for a run? It makes for something to talk about when you get back
- Using the commute across a festival site as I made my way to work
- Admittedly, I’ve procrastinated through the day and been forced to go in the evening to get it done before bed. Not ideal but sometimes, you’ve to do what you’ve got to do
I’m sure there are many other ways that I can’t remember in which I was able to get my run fitted into the day but that should be enough to give you inspiration of when and where you can fit it in.
The point that I’m making here is that, there’s always time in your day to get a workout in, whether big or small. It’s just down to how you prioritise your day and you removing activities that don’t serve you out of the schedule. The first one that comes to mind is phone time. How many hours do you put into your phone? I found out that when I went looking for time, I could always find a way. As they say, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
Unless you are purely efficient with your time and have no room due to everything being something that 100% serve you, you have no reasons and only excuses.
Fitness: Every Little Helps
Admittedly, for most of the days, I was running just the bare minimum of 2 miles for me to tick off that day of the challenge. But what surprised me about this was the improvement that I had in my fitness overall from that. Yes, there were spells where my training would be more structured but I would deem it few and far between. Certainly not enough to be the driving force in my improvements.
However, as I said, I saw some great improvements in the times and performances when I was competing either against the clock or in a race. The first thing that stood out to me was the progress I made in my half marathon time. You could argue that it was partly down to a technique improvement workshop but I doubt it was solely that based on the amount of time I knocked off. I was able to knock a whole…
5 minutes off!
I really doubt that was down to just my technique improving.
The next thing that I noticed was the vast improvement in my performance at Spartan Race, earning myself a very surprising podium within the Age Group race. After only finishing 19th in my Age Group in the last race I did, finishing 2nd was a vast improvement and again, as there wasn’t much to improve on with the obstacles, this is down to my CV getting better.
The final sign of my fitness improving was that though my times weren’t changing much, the average heart rate was slowly dropping from run to run. Alongside all of this, I had transformed my breathing style to being just simply nasal breathing. Initially, this did slow my pace but as time went on, the pace I was able to achieve with only nasal breathing improved back to the baseline from which I started.
This just goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to put miles and miles into your training to get a benefit. It can be achieved by training little, often and consistently. Of course, I’m not taking away from the fact that if you want to significantly improve your fitness towards a specific goal, having more structure, variety and targeted sessions will be better for you.
Building Discipline
You don’t want to let yourself down. When you have a goal and set yourself a standard, you need discipline to make sure you hit that target. You’ve got to make sure that you get out there everyday and start, even when you really don’t want to
Firstly, you need the discipline to get out there every day and actually do it. Trust me, some days are hard. Some days I would keep putting it off and putting it off, taking an hour or even two to psych myself up before I finally got to the task at hand. One day in particular that stood out to me was the day after completing a 100km race. I genuinely considered restarting the challenge the next day and making an excuse for my failure. Yes, people would have understood but deep down, I would have the regret of letting myself down. My legs were not up for the task at all and I was seriously tired but I had the discipline and resilience to drag myself out and get my 2 miles done. It may have taken me nearly 21 minutes to do it but I did it and it actually was a good thing for my recovery.
You build discipline by doing the things you need to do when you don’t want to do them.
Secondly, it’s having the discipline and integrity to yourself to meet the criteria that you’ve set and only counting that as a day complete when you do. I could have ran 1.99 miles but that would have been cheating myself. I could have counted that run that I conducted at 0013 for the day before but I would have been cheating myself. You need to have the discipline to hit the standards that you set yourself and not cheat yourself.
You may not like it at the time and be left wondering why you’re doing such a thing but the achievement will be worth it at the end, trust me!
When you have something to do everyday, you need to have the discipline to do it. The more you do it, the greater the discipline you build within yourself, which will spill over into your other areas of life. You’ll start asking yourself, if you can do one thing on a regular basis, what’s stopping you from following through with your promises to do the other things?
A lot of the motivation I’m talking about here is internal but there’s no harm in having some element of external motivation too. For me, though I was mainly using Strava for my own tracking, a certain amount of the daily drive I got was down to having eyes on me from other people, holding me accountable. This can be healthy and good to have as long as it’s not your only form of motivation. As that slowly dwindles and you lack the internal drive, you will likely end up failing.
It’s all well and good having other people driving your forward but it has to be within you too.
Adding To The "Cookie Jar"
This is a concept that I picked up from David Goggins, both spoke about in many podcasts that he has conducted and the featured as one of the lessons in his amazing book, Can’t Hurt Me. (If you want to read a full breakdown of that book, I spoke about how it changed my life here). The way that the concept works is when you do something hard and challenging, you remember it and put it in your mental “cookie jar”. This jar is then used when you are in the pain cave during another challenge and need motivation to get through. You pop open the cookie jar and start going through the hard things you’ve achieved in the past, showing yourself that you’re capable of beating whatever it is you’re tackling at that time.
For me, knowing some of the struggles I had with dragging myself out for some of the runs, one in particular I’ll talk about under the next point, I can safely say that this challenge is something that will go into my jar.
Listening To The Body
When you’re running everyday, you become very in tune with how your body is feeling, how recovered you truly are, and learning what’s too fast and too slow. You find out what good feels like, realise how you feel when things aren’t quite clicking and very aware of your technique. Being that in tune with our own body is a skill that many of us have lost and when you get it back, it brings a whole new perspective to your lifestyle, making you become aware to how certain things make you feel. You become empowered to start making positive changes and truly understand what actually good for you and what simply just makes you feel good with no other benefit.
Applied to physical activity, being able to listen to our body is key, especially when we are having to do something everyday without fail. This comes in the form of both tapering your training effort based on how you feel and working on any small issues that may arise in your physiology. Some days you will wake up and just feel “off”. You’re feeling fatigued, may have a little headache and just not firing on all cylinders but you’ve got to do your daily run. The answer to that is listening to your body and reducing the effort you put into your training. Rather than running 7 minute miles, reduce it to 8 or 9 minutes. The active recovery will allow your body to flush any built up waste products.
An example of when I had to really listen to my body, though I know a lot of people will think that I’m crazy for even thinking this was a good thing, was my post 100km daily run. I know, I know, many will read that sentence and think I’m stupid for doing it but actually, it did pay its dividends for me as it was a steady and easy form of active recovery. Yes, it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences and I didn’t set any new world records for the 2 miles as I plodded around at 10/11 minute miles however, getting the blood flowing through the muscles was great for me. Allowing the waste products to be more easily cleared and getting nutrients to the damaged muscles made the day after a lot easier for me. Where listening to my body comes into this is the fact that I went at a pace that I could manage without spiking my heart rate too much.
What Challenge Could You Take On?
Over to you now. After reading this blog, time for you to consider what challenge you could take on in life to be able to take it to the next level. Maybe you want to run everyday like I did? It could be that you are not a running fan but have been really wanting to get going again with your love of cycling, swimming or other sport. There’s no time like the present to give yourself a small manageable goal in whatever it may be that’s just outside of your comfort zone but also achievable to give you that motivation you need. Take some time, come up with something, set a simple but strict criteria for yourself and get going with it. You may even fail on the first attempt like I did but the main thing is you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back to it.
You can do this! The only thing stopping you is yourself. Are you going to feel the pain of letting yourself down or the euphoria of succeeding? The choice is yours.
That brings what I have to say on this challenge to a close. I hope that you enjoyed this post and were able to get something useful from it, whether it be just one of the lessons or all five. If after reading this you are inspired to take on your own challenge, drop it into the comments or tag me in a post/story on Instagram so I can follow you and your progress as you move through it. Whatever it is, I can assure you that it will be a rewarding process and you won’t regret it when you hit the ultimate goal. It’s very satisfying!
Outside of following me on Strava, you can also follow me on all the normal social media platforms by clicking the links below. Instead of just seeing how far I’ve ran each day an the training that I’m conducting, you can see the other great content that I create whether this be my photography with captions talking about certain topics, my reels helping you improve your life one step at a time or spontaneous live insights to what’s going in my head or my life. Oh, and you’ll be able to hear when my latest posts are released.
So what are you waiting for? Get following me!
