Calendar Club – March 2026

Typically the first time anyone hears a new idea, it’s immediately rejected. You reject it because new ideas won’t fit your mental framework of how the world works or what is possible. This happens in running when you are introduced to certain distances or events. You might be able to wrap your head around running a 5K, but a marathon is something for elite athletes. Or if that is theoretically feasible, then an ultra is plain crazy. And let’s not even talk about my beloved hundred milers.

You need to be careful though because you will be slower to shun the idea the next time you come across it. You won’t seriously consider it the third or fourth times either, but now you may start to wonder. And that curiosity if left unchecked will slowly grow until you start to think “why not me?”

Calendar Club

In which you run in miles, the day of the month. So one mile on the 1st, 5 on the 5th, all the way up to 30 and 31 miles the last two days of March. Here’s the mileage by week:

• Week 1: 7 days, 28 miles
• Week 2: 7 days, 77 miles
• Week 3: 7 days, 126 miles
• Week 4: 7 days, 175 miles
• Week 5: 3 days, 90 miles

Overall, we’re talking 496 miles over the course of a month and more miles in each of the last 3 days than the entire first week combined. It took me years after hearing about this for me to go from “Oh, hell no” to “maybe someday”. It then took several more years before I decided this was something I actually wanted to do. The biggest challenge for the calendar club beyond the physical aspect is the sheer amount of time required for the last couple weeks. It’s almost impossible to fit that in with work/family commitments and still get a decent amount of sleep. Now that the whole 9 to 5 thing is in my rearview mirror, I finally have the time available to devote to this.

My overarching goal for this calendar club challenge is to use it as a massive training block leading up to Coast to Coaster 232M next month. As such, I want to come out the other end of this stronger than I went into it. The focus will be on recovery and sustainability. I’m not in this to blaze away or push through things. I’m not here to carry the boats people.

I’m not sure if there are necessarily any official rules to this, but I’ll be using these two guidelines:

• All runs as a single activity
• No minimum amount of running

The single activity bullet is more because I don’t want to perform a dozen wardrobe changes or have to shower 4-5x throughout the day. I also know that it’ll be easier to motivate myself once to get my miles in all in one go rather than having to coax my abused battered tired body out the door multiple times.

My second guideline is meant to keep me from overextending myself if I need a “rest” day. As long as I run a couple steps, I’m fine to count it as a run. This is how I mostly treat my run streak where some day after race runs are more a shuffle-walk (and I’m being very generous here) than a run. But that’s OK. I’m no longer attempting to conform to what others think running should be.

In order to get through this month without breaking myself, I’m changing up my approach in a couple critical ways. Firstly, I don’t normally fuel my training runs outside some lemonade or Gatorade if I’m going 20 miles. I’m planning on executing my race fueling (50 calories/mile) starting from day 6 onwards. Secondly, I do all my training runs at the same easy effort. Once I reach 10 miles, I’m going to cut back my pace 20% every other day. So one day will be whatever easy effort I want to run and the following day will be 20% slower than that. I can usually maintain my easy pace up to a 20 miler so it’ll be interesting to see how my pacing changes as the accumulated stress takes its toll.

Overall, I’m excited to see how this challenge plays out. I’m four days in and the physical aspect is obviously really, really easy so far. Mentally I’m starting to get a little frazzled as I think about how many miles I still have to go this month. I was thinking it would take a couple weeks to reach this point, but I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Time to start treating this like an ultra and not think past the next aid station or day in this context. Afterall, tomorrow is just 5 miles.