31 Days

Thanksgiving weekend I was working my way through a pile of old Runner's World magazines that had been given to me and I read this article, "A Season to Streak" where the author talks about his first Thanksgiving to New Year's running streak inspired by a friend of his.  Basically, he committed to running at least a mile every day between Thanksgiving and New Year's.  Now I am not a big, hot runner. I run because I feel better when I do and because I like to eat what I want to eat.  I don't love running for the sake of running.  Some days running is really easy, other days it is very hard.  Most day fall somewhere in between though and I am happy.  I run more in the summer when the weather is nice and I can run outside.  In the winter I run on my treadmill and I run less.  No hard and fast numbers.  With all of that said, this article lodged an idea in my head that would not go away--what if I did this?  It was too late to do the whole turkey day to 2015 thing, but what if I ran every day in December?  Could I?

Turns out I could!

I tracked my mileage every day and turned in an impressive (to me anyway!) 76 miles for the month.  That's 3+ marathons.  I'm pretty proud of that!  I ran nearly all of them in my own living room on my treadmill...a few on hotel treadmills and one grueling mile on snowshoes.  I learned a bit about myself along the way, too!

sweaty selfie at the end of my streak on December 31

Things I learned:

• It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.  Pre-streak I was running 3 or 4 miles Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and attending a workout class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.   I tried to rearrange those miles so I wasn't running a bunch more and hurting myself.  It sort of worked.
• As long as you're running a mile you might as well keep on going!  There were several times that I thought I'd just do one and ended up doing two or three.  A mile takes me less than 10 minutes, so I often felt like I might as well keep going which meant my mileage did increase a bit over the month.
• It's sort of addictive!  I didn't run on New Year's Day, but I did over the weekend. I hardly ever run on weekends...this weekend I really wanted to.  I don't know how long that motivation will hold out.
• I really did feel like I had more energy...a good thing during the busy holiday season!
• My family thought I was a little (maybe a lot!) crazy, but they supported me.  Thanks guys!