I happened to notice the other day that my current run streak is now over a year. In the past I documented how my streak of 800+ days ended but actually, full disclosure, this streak isn’t quite a year as I missed a day last December. I went to a funeral in another part of the country and stayed with a friend but I could easily have taken some kit and gone out for a jog. It’s still over 250 days. For me, creating a run streak isn’t that difficult – in part because I like going out for a run but also because they don’t need to be complicated to achieve them.
Ron Hill is the gold standard for run streaks claiming to have run at least one mile every day for 52 years and 39 days. It started in 1965 and finally ended when he was approaching eighty years old. I remember reading an article in an Runner’s World back in the early 1990s where he detailed his run streak, but it was different then. Ron had run twice every day during that period and he was excited that in 1991-92 he would be coming up to have completed a streak of 26.2 years – a marathon’s worth of two-a-days. He had surgery for a bunion in 1993 so it was probably then he downgraded to once per day.
While I would debate whether Ron’s 27min completion of a mile following the foot surgery really counts as running, there is one thing to take away – his streak only required him to do a mile. When I started my streak last July it was after a hamstring injury and I was only doing about 400 metres. A lap of the road I live on – running it in 2-1/2mins or less. It wasn’t because I wanted to start a streak but it was the sensible way to test the injury, get some blood flowing to it and rebuild. After a week or so, I began to add a second lap making it a 4-5 minute run and then extending to a mile most days. I even added in a Sunday ‘long’ run of two miles which took 16+mins! All this added up to weekly mileage of around ten miles. Not massive mileage but consistent.
Once I was sure the injury was gone I could easily have gone back to higher mileage but I began to enjoy just getting up from my computer, throwing on some kit, doing four laps of the road in 8-9minutes and walking back into the house barely having broken sweat. Where for many years I had run for at least thirty minutes per day and often the better part of an hour; now I was enjoying how quickly it was all done – it was mentally refreshing.
In the following months I joined the gym and, with that being the focus, continued the low-volume training while doing high intensity interval work four times per week. It was only about six months ago that I began to increase my daily runs and once the gym was complete for the winter I’ve been rebuilding higher volume of almost forty miles per week.
I’m heading back to the gym in a few weeks’ time for another winter of strength training and will be experimenting again with low volume running. That’s out of necessity as high mileage isn’t going to be complementary to all the squats and deadlifts I intend to do. The body needs to get some rest along the way. It only has a certain amount of recuperative power.
Big Red Running 