Runner’s World Run Streak – AKA Senff’s Bootcamp

Runner’s World has a holiday run streak challenge that it does. This is heavily US based so it runs from their Memorial Day May 25th until July 4th. That’s 41 days where you commit to running at least 1 mile each day.

One of my co-workers, Senff, recruited a few of us to join him in this and he ran a tight ship. I wasn’t sure I’d really be able to do it, as I usually require some rest days and I planned on doing some other fairly heavy exercising as well. In the end 1 mile works out to be only about 1.6 km, so I decided I would do at least 2 km each day and joined in.

There were a few days where I found it really tough to go out, but being with friends kept me going. I didn’t always live up to Senff’s expectations, but I did at least 2 km every day. Total I ran 178 km over the 41 days for an average of 4.3 km a day.

This was a great way to build the habit of running again. It took a bit of planning, especially around days when doing a big bike ride or something like that. I had to plan out a few days of only 2 km runs and time them so I’d be good to do the rest of what I had planned.

In the past couple weeks Noah has started coming with me as well about 5 times a week. So far he’s running anywhere from 2 – 4 km with me. It’s fun to have him with me. On days he’s running he gets up and gets dressed for running right away, and as soon as I’m ready to go, so is he.

There was one weird aspect of this challenge that I allowed to get to me. Because I knew I had to run each day, I didn’t really push myself to run further, or faster. I did some, but never pushed it as far as I could. I was scared I’d hurt myself, or it would ruin the next days run, and never ran more than 7.5k.

During the whole challenge I never ran a 5k run in under 30 minutes. As today as the last day and I don’t feel the absolute need to run tomorrow, though I probably will, I pushed it. I managed to run a full 10k in under 1 hour.

Though a few times it felt like a real chore, I’m glad I was pushed to keep going and was able to complete this streak and fell good about running again.