Don't Stop Me Now
This holiday season, I went streaking. Not in the “no clothes on a summer camp dare” way, but the “running every day” way.
Runner’s World hosts a yearly run streak from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day to encourage people to keep running over the holidays. I usually run five days a week if I’m training for a race, and four if I’m not. But my pre- and post-long run rest days are usually sacred, so I’ve never participated. Until this year.
Why?
Goals. At the beginning of 2018, I set a goal to run 1,500 miles over the course of the year—an increase on the 1,225 miles I ran in 2017. With a couple sub-100-mile months in February, May and July, I knew I needed to step it up in the final months of 2018.
Training timing. I signed up for the February 2019 Austin Marathon in July and have been training since September. Instead of falling on my “offseason” between fall and spring half marathons, this year the run streak happened during my ramp-up to peak mileage in January.
Matt Fitzgerald told me to. One of the books I read this year was The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition: A Cutting-Edge Plan to Fuel Your Body Beyond "the Wall" by Matt Fitzgerald. I bought it because the back cover said it’d help me “avoid common pitfalls such as GI discomfort during running.” While he shared no secrets that helped me stop shitting in the woods every long run, Fitzgerald does recommend running—slowly—every day during training for runners that can do so without injury.
Why not? I’d never run more than five days in a row before. I wanted to see what would happen if I did.
So I did it. I ran every day for 41 days—runs ranging from 1.3 to 22 miles for an average of 6 miles a day. Most were in the cold, some were in the snow and one was even in the pouring rain. My average pace was between 8:45 and 9:15 minutes per mile—compared to an average pace of 8:30–8:45 during runs prior to the streak.
Here’s what happened.
Goals? Crushed ‘em. I closed out 2018 with 1,532 miles. It’s nothin’ on Pete Kostelnick’s 10,000+ miles, but as a mere mortal, I’ll take it.
I was tired. Staying up past 10 p.m. became a Herculean feat. On weekdays, I was often asleep at 9:30 and up around 5:30. On weekends, I went to bed around the same time, but slept in an extra hour or two. Over the holidays, I still slept eight to 10 hours a night and spent most of my non-running waking hours on the recliner.
I was hungry. Carbs, carbs, carbs, just like Matt Fitzgerald told me. I started thinking of myself as The Very Hungry Caterpillar—or rather, the Very Hungry Hannah, devouring endless servings of pasta, rice, bananas, applesauce, tofu, toast, beans, Brussels sprouts and peanut butter pancakes, supplemented with holiday dips and pastries. Relentless hunger comes with the marathon training territory, even when you’re not running every day.
But I wasn’t injured. Whether it was my dynamic pre-run stretch and static post-run routine, the nonstop eating or the heavy sleeping, I made it through 41 days of running without any injury and with minimal soreness.
And I didn’t get sick of it. More than getting physically injured, I feared mental burnout. But it never came. Of course there were days that I didn’t feel like running, but they were no more frequent than when I was running four or five days a week. I always felt better after getting my run in—proving, at least in some cases, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.
Let’s see if I can keep the streak going. (‘Cause I’m havin’ a good time, havin’ a good time.)