From a Non Runner to Running 100 Miles in a Month
Running 100 Miles in one month looks a stiff target if you just think of it and even more for a newbie as you need to start from number 0 (Zero).
For an outdoor sports lover and player, the pandemic brought its own challenges with the social distancing norms amid closure of state parks and outdoor facilities for public use.
I was a causal runner/jogger who had participated in 5K runs earlier but had never thought of considering running as a part of my daily routine due to laziness or right attention or right time management.
So when in pandemic everybody was forced to stay indoors and work from home after couple of months it started reflecting on me with weight gain with no fitness regime amid long work hours.
After being in status quo for 3 months, it all started to change when one fine day one of my social media contacts did setup a non-stop 2 hour indoor run challenge to be done at home during the time of peak covid time. I took that as my first baby step to start a time based routine with a small goal to accomplish. I completed that with a sense of pride and contentment.
That was the first milestone towards working towards a goal however small it may sound at that time. After completing similar indoor walk challenges, I slowly moved to outdoor morning run routines on a regular basis. It slowly became a part of my daily routine with every run contributing for my next milestone.
#Don’t Quit
Then came a chance to get involved in a fundraiser to run 100 miles in 1 month to help fight AHS. It was little daunting to start with, but with the goal in sight and required determination to achieve it was matter of breaking that into small targets of running a 5 miles/day for 4 weeks (5 days run + 2 days rest). It was easy to start with but the challenge was to make it part of your daily routine so that you continue the process every day without fail.
As an analogy to “Agile” (project management process to execute tasks/projects mainly used for software development) way of doing things in multiple sprints (well defined time periods) used commonly in corporate world, the task of completing 100 miles in a month was achieved by breaking 100 mile distance into 4 smaller tasks of completing 25 miles in a week.
#Process
After this experience regular runs became easier to manage and it quite became a habit to run on daily basis without having to think twice.
This was just the right stepping stone to help me in preparing for the ultimate goal to run a full marathon (26.2 miles) at end of the last year.
Again running a full marathon is a quite an ask but if you think of running as small chunks of 5 miles sets with required intermittent cooling period was my secret to complete this challenge.
Within 12 weeks of prep work i completed my first TCS NYC marathon in under 6 hours (5 hours and 32 minutes). “As they say, if you focus on the process, results will take care of themselves.”.
Looking back 2020 amid all what has been happened and considering managing a family with 2 small kids it gives me a great sense of satisfaction that i was able to incorporate running in my life and i would like to build on this in the coming new year.
#Running #Life Lessons
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