If you want to read all about my running this year and meeting my goals then I have already written about this when I achieved my revised target of 814 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats. This post is going to concentrate on the new achievement of pushing on to 1000 miles.
After reaching my revised target, I ended November needing to run 150 miles. In the back of my mind I had it that I would really like to run 1000 miles in a year.
Having thought about it, I thought I can either wait a whole 365 days and more in order to achieve this goal, or I could buckle down and try and run 150 miles in December – a monthly total I had not achieved before.
I started off so well running every day up until the 10th December. Then the winter weather kicked in and although I had gone on a few frosty runs, this was different as it was icy under foot out. I decided not to go out as I could do myself some damage.
Instead I got out our home treadmill and did 5.1 miles. Getting off the treadmill after this I knew I had a problem – blisters on my feet. The treadmill was strange. My feet were killing me with two large blisters on the balls of both feet – the right worse than the left but my legs felt like they hadn’t run at all. I needed to take a few days off.
I got back on it on the 14th December and ran everyday until Christmas day. This took me almost to the target and I needed to only do 20 miles in the final week.
My body started to suffer a little towards the end with very stiff muscles and a sore knee. I used to have a sore knee in my early teens when playing football and this felt similar. In fact my joints were also “cracking” a lot when walking.
Still I am so pleased I have achieved what, at the start of the year I would not have thought was something that I could do.
Here are some of the key statistics for my running this year.
- Total number of runs: 211
- Total kcal burned: 151,079
- Total time running: 117 hours 59 minutes
- Total elevation gained: 29,849 ft
- Total distance: 1000.6 miles
- Best time for 1 mile: 6 minutes 14 seconds
- Best time for 1 kilometre: 3 minutes 46 seconds
- Best time for 5 kilometres: 20 minutes 18 seconds
- Best time for 10 kilometres: 43 minutes 4 seconds
- Brooks Ghost 9 running shoes total distance: 707.5 miles
- Skechers Go Walk shoes total distance: 297.1 miles
How far?
Well I will say it again (I’m quite chuffed to be honest!) I have ran 1000 miles in 2017. Let’s imagine for a minute that I lived in London, 1005 miles would get me all the to Naples in Italy. That blows my mind a bit that I could actually run that far!
To give some more context to some of the numbers:
- Calories – this is the equivalent of 557.5 mars bars or 278 Big Mac’s.
- Total elevation – this is pretty much the equivalent of the height of Mount Everest
- Total time – nearly 5 days running none stop for 24 hours a day. If I’d have ran non stop from 1st January at midnight, I would have finished running on January 5th at around midday.
Featured image credit: Photo by Bill Erickson
