Run Streak Day 365!

A year ago I went for a guilt run. All my friends were running the Savannah Rock n Roll half or full marathon but I wasn’t. In fact I hadn’t run much for the previous nine months. That first mile sucked. It was slow and I was achy but it set off what I hoped would be at least a month long streak.

Here we are a year later and I’m still going. It’s been a great year for running. I had some hard days of course but never anything that was going to stop the streak. The worst days were when I had a cold or when the weather was changing, those first hot days or cold days were always a trial. The bad days were occasional though and the good outweighed the bad. Savannah is a beautiful place to run and I used these runs to explore parts of the city I had not seen before.

There were few running tips I learned along the way.

Change your routes. Exploring is fun. Vary your routes to keep things from being too boring. A run streak already has the taint of repetition. Take that element out and make it new as often as possible.

Take some easy days. I gave myself a mile minimum. I took advantage of that minimum at least twice a week. I thought of them as the recovery days you might take while training. This gave me a mental break I needed and my body a little a day or two to recover.

Take pride in the statistics. I love numbers and it was fun to keep a running log to see what exactly I accomplished in a years time. The numbers started slow but after a year they add up. Longevity has it’s rewards. I used Runkeeper but a notebook to log those miles works as well.

Here are a few of the numbers I kept up with.

Mileage: I covered 778.6 miles, not too shabby I think.

Time: I covered that mileage in a total of 124 hours.

Calories: I trusted Runkeeper on this one so take it with a grain of salt but, 116,500 calories is a big number. In fact I lost 30 pounds over that year, not something I planned but it happened.

So the next question is how long does the streak continue? As I write this it’s a few days after 365 and I’m still going. I have no idea how long I’ll keep at it. The problem with a streak is that there is always the next number. 365 is awfully close to 400?