A few weeks ago, my husband and I had the opportunity to run with Ron Hill, who as many will know has been running every day for over 50 years. Ron is 77 years old, and was a gold medal winner in his time. Ron clearly loves his running, and just speaking to him it became clear that he hadn’t set out to run such an epic runstreak, he just really enjoys what he does. He’s clearly fit and healthy, and it got us thinking about how we both really hope we’re still running in our 70s.

I’ve watched as others have embarked on runstreaks in the past, some now well past day 1000  of running every day, and I’ve wondered how they do it. In fact, I’ve silently admonished them for daring to ask their bodies to run every day without rest. I’ve been an injured runner on two occasions during the last 5 years, and I have never understood how somebody can run that much without getting injured. Since embarking on my coaching qualifications, I’ve also learnt a lot about recovery, and quality over quantity, and I can spot the symptoms of overtraining easily now, It would be fair to say I’ve been very dubious about runstreaks for these reasons.

However, after seeing how normal Ron Hill is, and after chatting to other runners who had completed the October #RunEveryDay challenge, we decided to set ourselves a bigger challenge of running every day for a year. I’ll let my husband write his own reasons for doing this, but for me it’s really just an experiment to see what happens. I’m anticipating that I’ll improve fitness, and avoid injury by becoming stronger. I’m also interested in how it could potentially boost my mental strength and impact on other areas of my life: for example, will it have a positive or negative effect on my other priorities? Will it boost, or reduce, my immune system? Will I see an improvement in my running pace, or will it tire me out?

We have only set one rule, and that is that for it to count as a runstreak, we must go out and run at least one mile every day.

I would love to know your thoughts if you have experience of a runstreak, or if you are thinking of trying one. Feel free to join us on Strava, Twitter or Facebook #Run366