Streaking! (Not Naked)

One of my last minute additions to my 2012 easy goals was to break my record for longest streak.  This was obviously one of my easier goals to break, because I never really tried to run continuously before.  Today marks my 13th day of running in a row! I'm not sure how long I plan on taking this, but so far my legs feel good, and if I'm not too sick or injured, knock on wood, I plan to continue. Now I know 13 days in a row may sound impressive but let me tell you just as always as this case there are folks out there who take something and completely run away with it (pun intended). Just take a look here at this list on runeveryday.com. That's right, this guy Mark Covert has run every day for over 43 years! I think in order to count as the streak continuing, the minimum is 1 mile a day, but I believe this guy had averaged 11 miles a day when this article was written about him in 1995! (My plan to continue my running streak is subject to change without notice; void where prohibited.)

It's interesting how our idea of what is reasonable changes over time.  When I started running about 3 years ago, I  trained usually 3 or 4 days a week which is pretty common for starting out.  I did this even for my first marathon.  I hadn't really considered training too much more than that, and really enjoyed my days off.  I felt like I had earned them with all the crazy miles I was putting in (roughly 20 - 30 per week). After my first marathon, where I faded at the end, (very common for first timers) I started thinking about what went wrong, and I was thinking about hydration, salt, stretching, shoes, other crazy things I could blame, but I never considered that perhaps I was not really prepared.  I had convinced myself that I had done my training and "put in my miles" and I was ready. After reading a few books and a few hundred posts on a few message boards, but mostly from RunningAHEAD, I realized that the answer was pretty much more miles.

Now it's a couple years later and hopefully I'm a bit wiser about running and more importantly, wiser about myself in regards to running.  That is not to say that in a couple years from now I'll look back at this blog post and think that I was an idiot, but to my future self reading this, "You may be a little wiser, but man you are old."