A couple of years ago I made the somewhat arbitrary decision to run 1000 miles in a calendar year. It seemed a reasonable target given at this point I’d been running fairly regularly for a while and had already completed two ultra-distance events the previous year. If I can run 100 miles in two days then managing 900 in the other 363 days should be a (brisk) walk in the park. I was also now equipped and fairly competent with the means to accurately record my achievement using GPS.
So, broken down I would need to do,
2.74 miles per day or,
19.23 miles per week or,
83.3 miles per month.
Easy right?
January went something like this…
Week 1 – still fairly bloated and hungover from Christmas/New Year so a week off won’t hurt. Dead easy to catch up 2.74 miles a day and 83 miles I can virtually do in a day so no worry.
Week 2 – Better get out and do a 10k that’s virtually a week’s worth…right?
Week 3 – Bloody hell it’s miserable outside, better to make hay whilst the sun shines.
Week 4 – Oh shit…I’ve only managed 20 miles…never mind I’ll make it up in February.
February – for some reason this poxy month is two days shy of a full one, so not really worth bothering with.
March/April – not really sure what happened, but I know I spent most of the Easter bank holidays doing family stuff, yeah them!
May – 19th – my 40th birthday. Thanks to my wonderful soon to be wife I spent much of this period drunk or hungover. At my actually surprise 40th birthday party I chatted with a pal, who is a talented and capable club runner and confidently reasserted my yearly ambition, neglecting to mention I was barely up to 200 miles at this point. When he said, glibly, that he he’d passed that mark somewhere in April I did feel slightly crestfallen. When he offered me a birthday drink I didn’t hesitate to accept despite being half way down my fifth pint and a whisky was suggested as a logical accompaniment. Unsurprisingly I didn’t do much running in the subsequent week.
June – got married. Took running shoes on honeymoon in Las Vegas. Did 0.0 miles running. Too hot.
And so it went on. As it happened I did knuckle down in September and produce a somewhat miraculous result by going 3 hours quicker in the 50 miles Longmynd Hike from the year previously and although satisfied with the achievement I couldn’t help but wonder what might have been had I been able to get the 19.23 miles in each week.
Anyhoo.
Following the Londmynd Hike in October I started running with a bunch of lads who were pals of colleague and who lived local to me. This had a couple of significant effects. Up to this point I had never, other than in one particular event bothered with running too much off road and certainly I rarely ran after 7pm at night. As a 9-5 worker with a younger child I was invariable unable to run early in the morning (don’t like getting up to be honest) and most evenings I would be ferrying offspring or doing other stuff. Running with a group opened up a whole world of nocturnal opportunity, particular on the local hills, tracks and bridal paths that surround where I live. The fact these group excursions often ended up in the pub was all the motivation I needed. Places that were literally 10 minutes from my door suddenly became familiar, having never been.
My end of year total scraped to around the 500 mile mark I think, despite the fact it felt like I had run quite a bit. So I started the new year with vigour. 2.74 miles a day..2.74 miles a day..2.74 mi…you get the picture. 3 miles on the 1st of January and I’m in business.
One thing I knew was that I couldn’t leave this to chance. Not planning to run was planning to fail, but this didn’t change my responsibilities to family or the demands on my time from work. I knew I had to make certain commitments.
No.1 – if child is doing something I don’t have the option to sit and wait for her to finish. I run instead. One hour at Tuesday gymnastics became the Earl’s Loop weekly 10k. Saturday squash stopped being aimlessly mess about in the gym or drink coffee in the club bar, it became weekly 4 miles around the woods at the back.
No. 2 – commutes. This presented a bit of a problem because my job, sometimes randomly requires me to use my car. But, on reflection, a few of my colleagues didn’t have cars and appeared to manage their demands. Again this required planning. Change of clothes in situ, towel at work, mindful diary management, trying not to look like a dickhead walking out of the building in Lycra etc.
No.3 – sign up for stuff. Fear failure. I know my ability and it’s limited, but I need to know that someone won’t be pasting me off the floor or putting me in a meat wagon, bereft of the cut off time. My ego wouldn’t allow it. This did lead to a couple of, ‘Love, I’ve signed up for this on Saturday the 12th’ conversations, quite often leading to, ‘no, you’re not’ responses!.
This all helped, but still it was incredibly demanding to commit to the required time to achieve the arbitrary goal I had set myself. The down side to all of this was that at times I was wedded to quantity not quality, cramming 3 milers here and there and probably not resting where my body could have done with a day or two. In a year I managed to run 3 ultras, two trail marathons and get off on a couple of all day adventures with pals, that probably accounted for a quarter of the annual requirements in total, but also a couple of stints of recovery thanks to being a bit bashed up.
In the end I ran a 40 mile last week of the year saving the final 3 miles for New Years Eve and a sense of enormous well-being. Perhaps it is about those joggers going round and round?
Black Country Trundler: A tale of slow running, fast food and loud music (sometimes all at once) 