Feeling Ambitious

As January comes to a close I thought I might provide a fitness update.

After reviewing my 2016 stats on Smashrun.com, I decided that, since I came in under 1,000 total miles last year, I ought to try for over 1,000 miles of running this year. That works out to be about 2.75 miles per day, which feels pretty reasonable to me. If nothing else, I need only have a year similar to last year, but without a big gaping break in June.

Reasonable goals are nice and provide good satisfaction when you reach them, but ambitious goals are even more fun.

I had a rather ambitious idea shortly after coming up with my 1,000-mile goal: What if I were able to run for 100 consecutive days, without taking any formal rest days. If I needed a rest day, I could just run very slowly or very low mileage, or both. Given how much I run, the challenge for 100 consecutive days of running is not physical, per se. I won’t find it physically daunting to go out for a run every day for one hundred days. On the other hand, ensuring that my schedule remains free and open such that I always have time to go for a run is quite another story. Keeping my will power attuned to a goal like that is also a major challenge since people like to take days off every once in a while. On a nice and sunny day, or a cold and stormy one, it’s easy to let the workout slide and go do something else. In short, running one hundred days in a row is a challenge that is more mental than physical.

It’s been going well. By the time most of you read this, I will have run twenty consecutive days, a fifth of the way to my endpoint.

Ten days into my project, however, there was another development. My wife because a Beachbody coach and subscribed us to Beachbody On Demand, the company’s streaming video service. It is essentially “Netflix for exercise videos,” if you will, and it comes with the ability to stream the world-famous P90X program. This is something I have always wanted to try, and having it “on tap” in my own home proved to be too great a temptation to resist.

As a result, I am now waking up at four o’clock every morning and working my way through a 60-to-90-minute P90X workout. And that’s in addition to my continued progress toward a hundred days of running.

Today I’m ten days into P90X and twenty days into my running goal. If all goes well, I’ll finish both initiatives on exactly the same day and I will have accomplished two reasonably difficult fitness goals at exactly the same time.

Ambitious? Yes. Will I be able to do it? I’m not sure. But if I do, it might be the most difficult physical undertaking I’ve ever managed. Wish me luck!