0997, 0998, 0999, 1000.

Running Streak Day 0001

The first day of Across The Year's 72-hour race, in its final year at Nardini Manor. I'm not going to look up the results, but my recollection is that I completed a dismal 50k in that first day, before some wild storms came in overnight which first soaked people to their bones and then froze everyone into popsicles. I finished that race with 106 miles, which is the first time I've gone a hundred miles in a single race.

Running Streak Day 1. Before the storms.

In the interest of brevity, let's skip a few days.

Running Streak Day 0997

This was a "fake zero" run, squished in a Friday afternoon after work. Having just come off a 100-mile attempt in Colorado, I've been week, tired, and lethargic all week and today was no exception. I ran a mile loop from my house and went shopping.

Running Streak Day 0998

After sleeping until 10 (again with the recovery), I packed up the family and drove to Queens Hall Of Science to visit Maker Faire. We were there until about 6pm. Our car was parked a third of a mile away, so I told Alex I'd go get the car and pick them up. Wearing denim shorts and a cotton t-shirt, and carrying a shopping bag, I ran to the car, but instead of stopping I did a quick 2/3 mile loop when I got there bringing the total distance run to just over a mile.

Running Streak Day 0999

I planned to do this run with some friends from the tri club, but the issue was that everyone had their own schedules to attend to and I was still in hardcore recovery mode. One person ran with me - 3 miles in about 33 minutes - and then we went for coffee. Over the next two hours about a dozen people trickled in, after they either finished their runs or just came in for a coffee after not running due to injury. That was fun. I then went to church and took a nap.

Running Streak Day 1000

At around day eight hundred I put a meeting entry on my work calendar for this occasion, at at around day nine hundred I invited a half-dozen of my regular running group to join me. Then this happened and three of the six people are no longer around in Park Ridge. Then I caught a cold and couldn't even go to work that day. What a drag! So I worked from home for a few hours (not very productively) and then took a ten-minute drive to Ramapo Reservation with my wife where I did a counter-clockwise lap of the pond, then turned around ran clockwise until finding my wife who was walking a loop. I then stopped my watch and walked back to the car with her.

Streak runs are not always very glamorous, even when they're major milestone runs. But that's kind of the point, isn't it?

1.37 miles in 14:54. That's a sick man run right there.

This is what my runningahead.com log looks like today