Last month I completed the Calendar Club which is a running challenge where you run in miles the day of the month. This is a report on how it went.
Background and Context
Before I get into it, a little background on me. I’ve been running consistently for 13 years now. I crossed 30k lifetime miles early on in this challenge so I have a solid base. My focus is on ultras with 70 finishes over the last 12 years with 41 of those being hundred miles or more. So I am somewhere between experienced and very experienced when it comes to running endurance challenges. This would be something completely new for me though with total monthly mileage about twice what I normally max out during the year.
Goals and Objectives
The simple answer is that I wanted to run in miles the day of the month (duh). Yet the how was just as important for me as the what. I was looking to use this challenge as a massive training block heading into my racing season. As such, I wanted to exit the month stronger than when I entered it. This meant I needed to manage my effort levels across the days and not push myself beyond what I could recover from before my next run started. Given the steady build in load over the course of the month, I knew that once I started digging myself into a hole that I’d never be able to reverse it. I don’t have any experience with this amount of volume so was biased to be more conservative.
The Gory Details
Strategy, The Pivot, And Finishing Strong
My strategy was to do all the miles as a single activity first thing each morning. I wasn’t necessarily against doubles/triples/(quads?) as much as it was just simpler to motivate myself to get out the door once rather than multiple times each day. I would rock my “easy” pace from the start through day 10 or 11. This is an effort level that I can maintain for a 20 mile long run without any issues. I guessed that by this point the accumulated fatigue would require me to start dialing things back a bit. I decided to go with a “recovery” pace on alternating days that was 20% slower than my “easy” pace. I naively thought I could then roll with this easy day and super easy day schedule through the end of the month.
Spoiler: didn’t happen.
At first, the recovery paces worked their magic with my easy pace getting faster on days 13 and 15. Unfortunately, they quickly reversed on days 17 and 19 with the latter easy pace being slower than any of the other ones month to date. Day 21 was where it all could have come crashing down. I noticed that not only where my easy paces slowing up, but that I was running a higher percentage of my recovery runs as well. I could see things starting to spiral, but my legs still felt fine so it wasn’t too late to stay ahead of things. Do I slow up my easy pace a little bit? Do I slow up my “recovery” paces to something closer or above 13 minutes? After waffling a bit, I decided to just do all my runs at a 12 minute pace for as long as that was sustainable. I wasn’t doing this for time and the truth is no one will ever ask me what my average pace was for something like this.
And a 12 minute pace turned out to be very sustainable for me. My legs never felt thrashed when I finished a run and they felt solid the next day. Maybe one or two hyper minor niggles that would loosen up over the first couple miles. I used my run/walk splits to determine how sustainable my pacing was. The higher the percentage, the slower my running and walking paces where signifying I wasn’t fully recovering from the prior day’s run. I was honestly surprised the percentage didn’t creep up as I got up into the high 20s. In reality, it got a little better which I’m attributing more to a stronger sustained hiking pace. This is perfect for me as most of the races I have planned for the year will require a significant amount of walking. I ended up going a little harder on my final day knowing I had a true rest day following, however I still had plenty of left in the tank when I got done.
Daily Recovery Tricks
- Strong run nutrition
- Limited activity post run
- Short afternoon walk
- Sleep early and often
I’ve found that the better I do with nutrition during races, the quicker I recover afterwards. My plan was to consume 50 calories every mile during my runs. I was able to execute this without any issues as the temperatures and pacing were both chill.
After each run, I would sit around with my legs up as much as possible. I’m recently retired so didn’t have to worry about logging 8 hours of work after my runs. There is no way I could have managed this while fully employed and those that do are amazing.
I wasn’t completely sedentary though. I kept up a short one mile walk each afternoon to loosen up my legs a bit. This was the easiest mile you can imagine. Just a teeny bit of movement to get the blood flowing.
Those first three things though probably contributed less than half towards my daily recovery. It’s all about the sleep IMO, which is when you body repairs itself. I made sure to log 8.5-9 hours in bed through day 19 and then 10 hours the rest of the month. Now I wasn’t able to sleep all those hours, but I wanted to make sure my body had the opportunity to sleep as much as it needed. And unsurprisingly, it needed most of that horizontal time.
Mental Health Considerations
It’s a bit ironic that as much as I love running long distances, I’m not a huge fan of the long training run. I look forward to races months in advance, but borderline dread the weekly 20 miler. They’re like eating vegetables and getting vaccinations for me. Necessary, but something to just grin and bear it. Going into this project, I was very concerned I would struggle the last week getting through the runs. Not so much physically, but just mentally grinding them out. I’m happy to report that was never the case. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of the runs. There was a couple days where it took me 4-5 miles to hit my groove, but those were the exceptions. I attribute this entirely to the easy paces. Pushing things physically wears on you mentally and since I never got to that point, I was able to actually enjoy the vast majority of the 94 hours rather than just tolerating them.
Weather Considerations
Unless you’re crazy enough to do this challenge on a treadmill, you’re going to be spending a ridiculous amount of time outside. I highly suggest being strategic when picking the month to attempt this. You want to pick something in spring or fall rather than summer or winter, which will just up the degree of difficulty. March ended up being perfect weather for me with most of my miles logged in 30-50 degree temperatures. There were a couple miles in the 20s and it got up into the 60s for my last 100K. There were only 4 days with rain during my runs. So just amazing running conditions.
Final Thoughts
I couldn’t be more pleased with how the month went. In hindsight, I was a little too conservative with my pacing though not by orders of magnitude. After pushing things a little on the last day, my legs were feeling it a bit more the next day. Best guess is 11:30ish pace would have been the quickest I could have executed this without frying my legs, but we’re basically talking about a round error here. More importantly is that I enjoyed my time out running and learned my body can handle super high mileage as long as I err on the side of slower paces.