‘ I’M A BEAST NOW!’
RUNNING IS A WASH WITH conflicting ideas – run further, run less; recover more, build up your mileage; slow down, speed up… We’re often left with the overarching principle of simply, ‘ Do what works for you’. But finding what works for you requires no small amount of experimentation. Luckily, I’m a willing guinea pig, and as I delved more into the idea of run streaking, from Ted Corbitt’s first recorded streak to today’s impressive global community of streakers – hearing the reasons powering their commitment and the rewards reaped – I decided I wanted in.
The rules I set myself were simple: I would run 5K every day for 50 days. The numbers had no special motive behind them other than being nice and round, but there were powerful reasons behind the streak itself: my running had become stale and without purpose. I was in a rut and needed something to help me out of it. Happily – and much to my surprise – running more than I ever had before had exactly the desired effect. Barring a few days when tiredness, stiffness or a hangover lessened the appeal, the act of running every day didn’t (as one might fear) make me sick of lacing up my trainers; it made me all the more eager to do so. I also felt fitter, more motivated and, dare I say it, happier than I had in a long time. All of which prompts the question: why don’t more runners do the same?
There are, of course, answers to that related to injury, performance and lifestyle; more on those later, but first you may be surprised to hear just how many runners actually do do the same. Many individual run streakers go unnoticed, but on a larger scale, national campaigns and even global organisations have been founded on the concept of running every day. Take the mental-health campaign RED January (redtogether.co.uk) – this was set up only a few years ago, but it has already
encouraged more than 30,000 people to run every day in January.
Further afield, the United States Running Streak Association (USRSA) (runeveryday. com) was founded in 2000 to list the achievements of every run s treaker a round the world; a t the time of writing it documents the streaks of 1,617 active streakers (as well as a further 839 who have brought their streaks to an end). ‘ We list streak runners from around 35 countries, including Réunion Island, Slovakia, Iran and Nigeria,’ says USRSA’S president Mark Washburne, who is 10,640-plus days – nearly 30 years – into a streak of his own.
Extreme measures
THE RUN STREAK, it seems, is more popular than ever, and my 50 consecutive 5Ks seems pretty paltry when compared with what Washburne has done so far, let alone the king of streaking, Ron Hill, who ran every day for no less than 52 years. Or, for that matter, thousands of other runners who have clocked consecutive days for astonishing lengths of time.
Among these is 63-year- old Steve Gathje, a ret ired actuary f rom Minnesota. Last year, Runner’s World spoke to Gathje shortly after he’d ended his run streak of 45 years and 10 months – almost 17,000 days. He ran on the days all four of his children were born, he ran the day before and after marathons, and he once ran around an airport car park when his flight got cancelled. He even ran on his wedding day. Gathje is no slouch, either – he averaged around seven miles a day and in 20 years of racing he finished more than a dozen marathons, achieving a PB of 2: 27: 30. On why he decided on run streaking, his reasoning was simple: ‘ I just thought, hey, that’s pretty cool. I can’t stop now.’
It’s hard to argue with that, but there are many reasons why people start – and continue – a run streak and seemingly no limits to where it can take you. The trigger for Southampton native Alice Burch’s 2016 world record 60 marathons in 60 days streak was a news story she saw in 2014 about a woman who had run 53 marathons in 53 days. She reckoned she could beat it, so she secured a track to run on, took time off from her job as a lawyer and lined up verification with the Guinness World Records committee. Every day, she ran 26.2 miles. Aside from a few races, that meant 105.5 verified laps around her track every day. Each marathon took her between 4:17 and 10 hours. ‘I had planned to run the marathon in one chunk each day, but this changed to marathon distance within a day,’ she says. ‘There were about five days where it took me extra hours as I was battling with leg niggles.’
Beyond fatigue, Burch, 38, says the biggest challenge was the emotional drain. Logistical hurdles, such as needing to take her daughter to and from school, also took their toll. ‘ I had no social life,’ she says. ‘I found myself falling asleep on my daughter’s bedroom floor many nights.’
Some streakers, such as 56-year- old Phil Sutcliffe, aren’t chasing world records but performance and fitness gains. At the time of writing, the man from Lichfield has managed some 540 days on the bounce. Over this period he’s incorporated, he says, ‘five marathons, countless 10Ks and 10-milers, fell races and 65 miles in three days along Offa’s Dyke’. For Sutcliffe, who’s spent 30 years of his life as a keen runner, the benefits of run streaking are numerous and significant. ‘ My fitness has improved massively,’ he says. ‘ In October 2018 I was four minutes faster over 10K than in the same race one year previously. My 2018 half-marathon time was also a whole 20 minutes faster than in 2017, and my VO2 max has increased. I’ve lost weight, sleep better than ever and feel great.’
As Sutcliffe has found, the commitment to getting out and exercising every day can have a transformative effect on your health. Olivia Frempong, 35, can only agree. When she was told she had elevated blood pressure, her doctor prescribed medication. A fter s taring at the prescription for a week, she opted to take
a different path: ‘ I decided to start running,’ she says. ‘So I ran for half a block and went a little further every day. And I fell in love. I went back to the doctor’s just two months later and my blood pressure was normal. I’ve now done five full marathons.’
At the time of writing, Frempong is on day 476 of her streak and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. ‘I’m going to keep going as long as I can,’ she says. ‘The run streak has turned me into a running monster – I’m a beast now!’
Claire Webster is another certified run streaker – throughout 2017 she ran every day. Her reasons were, she says, ‘ to keep motivated and to raise money for charity’. Although the 35-year- old ran a minimum of one mile a day, she also trained for her first, second and third marathons during the year, so, she says, ‘in reality I ran 50-mile weeks quite regularly’. And as with Sutcliffe and Frempong, running every day provided her with tangible fitness and health benefits. ‘ I felt so good throughout the year, I think partly because of the regular exercise, but also because I would forgo a drink with a meal as I knew I had to fit in a run the following day. I was looking at my nutrition and hydration a lot more carefully. At the start of the year I ran a half marathon in around two hours, and by the end of it I was 48 seconds off a Good for Age marathon time.’
Her year of running was not trouble free, though. ‘I hurt my hip just before my first marathon,’ she recalls. ‘ Dosed up on painkillers, I ran it anyway and then paid the price for a month after. I had to hobble a couple of one-mile days on crutches after that.’
For Ed Gildersleeve, 46, the impetus for starting a streak was more about mind than body. ‘I wasn’t running that regularly and I wanted to teach myself some discipline,’ he says. For extra motivation, he dedicated his streak to the children’s charity Make-a-wish, donating cash for every mile he ran.
The payback has been a boost in his mental wellbeing. ‘ I call running my adult time out,’ he says. ‘ It has helped me work through some serious things – stress, relationship changes, deaths and sicknesses in my immediate family – and happy stuff, too, like new adventures and discovering new things about myself. The biggest thing I’ve learnt to do is identify and accept the things I can’t do anything about. I can’t change whether it’s windy or cold or rainy outside when I run; that’s something I just have to embrace and work through.’
Social movement
WHETHER WE DON OUR running shoes every day or not, we can all relate to the enormously beneficial effect running can have on our state of mind and how we cope with life. And streaking can take this to the extreme, as evidenced by the story of Bert Kraft. As a struggling country music songwriter, when he heard one of his songs on the radio being claimed by a different artist, it hit him hard.
‘ I had a few angry years,’ says Kraft. Then a friend, nicknamed ‘ Bulldog’, encouraged him to start running. On one run, he christened Kraft with his own nickname. ‘He told me, “You’re like a raven. You always wear black, you’re up late at night and you write sad songs”,’ recalls Kraft. The pair ran together throughout 1974 and by the end of it, ‘ Raven’ was starting to feel less angry. On New Year’s Eve, he decided that 1975 would be different. For that one year, he was going
to run every day – and finally move on with his life.
More than 44 years later, Raven has definitely moved on — that oneyear streak just kept going, outlasting relationships, jobs, and even his bitterness about that song. He’s now run some 129,200 miles.
Every day, at 5: 30pm, starting at the 5th Street Lifeguard Station on Miami’s South Beach, Raven runs eight miles. Anyone who wishes to join him is welcome, and in doing so they will have their name added to the list he has kept of everyone who has run with him since 1977 – more than 3,000.
Raven doesn’t just run every day; he does a full eight miles, regardless of his mood, his painful back or the weather. ‘Being in a hurricane is pretty amazing,’ he says. ‘ You’re in God’s hands. Nature could do anything to you.’ He got his eight miles in through Irma, Irene, Wilma and the rest.
Still flying at nearly 70, Raven lives up to his nickname and he plans to run until the day he dies. ‘ I wouldn’t want to be around if I couldn’t run,’ he says. ‘ I love being out there in the elements, close to God and close to nature. It is my religion.’
For Darrel Stempke and his children Elijah, Jackson, Sierra and Annalise, run streaking may not have brought them together with 3,000 other runners, or closer to a deity, but sharing daily miles has helped them bond as a family. Every day, they run at least a mile together – that’s two laps around their block in Buena Park, California. It’s their family bonding time, where the kids can chat about their days without distractions. ‘ Imagine what your family talks about around the dinner table,’ says Darrell. ‘ But when you’re running, there is zero chance of someone looking at their phone.’
The Stempkes’ family time is also record breaking: in 2016, Elijah became the youngest documented person to run a mile every day for more than a
year, starting at the age of six. Jackson beat that record months later, starting at five. Less than a year later, Sierra beat him, starting just shy of four. And late last year, Annalise started her streak two months younger than Sierra did, at three years and nine months.
Darrell and his kids stumbled across streaking in 2015, after which Elijah decided he wanted to streak for at least a year. He and his dad started an attempt together on March 18, 2015; Jackson joined four months later, then his two sisters went from occasional companions to official streakers.
The family don’t streak for fitness; they typically run just one mile a day, at a leisurely 12-13 min/mile pace. (Mum Cristina occasionally joins them.) And while Darrell admits that he liked the idea of the records they’d break as a family, he stresses that he doesn’t force the kids to run. In fact, when his streak was broken by a bout of pneumonia in January, they kept running without him. Threatening anyone with exclusion from the daily run is, in fact, his most effective parental sanction.
THESE STREAKERS’ STORIES are inspiring and there are clearly many benefits to be gained from heading out every day, but it’s not without risks. The primary one is the lack of recovery time, says Alexa Duckworth-briggs, UK Athletics Coach in Running Fitness and We Run coach for Reading: ‘There are valid, science-backed reasons why a running coach wouldn’t advise running every day and why even elite runners don’t do it.’
One such athlete is American middle- and longdistance legend Bernard Lagat, who Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness refer to in their book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive With the New Science of Success (Origin Press). ‘ Lagat takes an off-day at the end of every hard training week,’ they write. ‘ On his offdays, he doesn’t even think about running.’ They cite several reasons for this, perhaps the most pertinent being, ‘Studies show that vigour and performance increase following a rest day.’
However, you can’t necessarily compare the recovery requirements of the average run streaker to those of a full-time professional athlete. And effective rest, as with most things in running,
‘ RUNNING IS MY RELIGION’
can’t be prescribed according to a one-size-fits-all formula. ‘ More experienced runners used to covering over 50 miles a week will need to do more in order to stimulate any kind of adaptation,’ says Scott Newton, the London Running Physio ( londonrunningphysio.com). ‘They can probably get away with an easy run to recover, because that is the relative rest they need.’ A recovery run, Newton advises, should be ‘between one and two minutes per mile slower than your regular pace’.
His next point, however, is perhaps the most crucial: ‘ If you’re new to running or you don’t do many miles, a complete rest day is going to be the downtime your muscles need in order to regenerate.’ Thus, going for days without rest is more of a risky business than it is for runners who have been regularly clocking the miles for years. Sutcliffe has been putting his body through its paces with relatively high weekly mileage for 30 years; Webster had been running for two years before her streak, but was previously a gym manager well used to the rigours of exercise. And I’ve been running for five years. Going for a run every single day will place stress on anyone’s body,
and only those with muscles, joints and tendons strong enough to withstand the daily impact will be able to keep injuries at bay.
David Plumer, general manager at The Running Works (therunningworks.net), agrees with Newton that beginners are ‘much more likely to get hurt, because of the increases associated with running every day’. He also argues that seasoned runners ‘know their bodies better, so they can read the early warning signs and adapt accordingly’ – eg by slowing down or tweaking their form.
INJURY RISKS ASIDE, there’s another potential problem that arises from the slow and steady pace that is often associated with a long and successful run streak: the negative effect on your performance, if you neglect the varied speed and endurance sessions necessary for all-round fitness improvements. ‘Running at the same pace every day isn’t a great idea if you want to improve,’ explains Newton, ‘ because one-pace running doesn’t stimulate the body in a complete way.’ To actually improve your performance during your run streak, he says, ‘ You need to train at different intensities in order to work at all areas of your fitness.’
This explains why, although both Webster and Sutcliffe improved during their respective streaks, I, despite feeling generally healthier, didn’t. Webster’s training was necessarily varied, with a mixture of endurance and speed- focused sessions, because her streak coincided with training for several marathons. And Sutcliffe’s approach is similar: ‘As well as varying distances,’ he says, ‘ I also vary pace, mixing threshold and tempo with much easier days. The reason I’ve been able to keep the streak going is because of that daily variety.’ I, on the other hand, didn’t mix things up, and while the 5Ks I ran weren’t slow, they were never particularly quick, nor did they show any significant improvement in time through the run streak.
But all that running wasn’t for nothing: it reintroduced me to routine, for a start. Whereas pre-streak I was inconsistent, at best, these days I’m running much more, and reaping the physical and mental rewards for doing so. DuckworthBriggs explains that, ‘ because a streak usually involves more running than you’d usually be doing in a week, your cardiovascular fitness will increase’. And covering more miles – if those miles are covered at an appropriate intensity and your body isn’t placed under excessive stress – can also provide payoffs in terms of muscular strength. ‘Those who are able to run every day,’ says Plumer, ‘are essentially keeping everything ticking over, and, in the process, strengthening all key muscle groups and connected tissues.’
If you want to commit to a run streak, however, Duckworth-briggs suggests a few technique considerations. ‘ When running while fatigued, your form will change and this increases injury risk,’ she warns. ‘The most common changes in form when you’re tired are the head and shoulders dropping forward and the stride lengthening.’ To rectify these issues, she advises that you ‘imagine a helium balloon pulling your head upright on top of your neck, and regularly roll your shoulders back to maintain good posture while running.’ As well as that, she recommends you keep an eye on the number of steps you take per minute. ‘ If it starts to drop off,’ she suggests, ‘ use a music playlist or metronome app to keep to your normal cadence.’
With the right approach – varied sessions, proper form, gradual progression – a run streak can go hand in hand with improved fitness and quicker times. But that’s not really the point. If you’re chasing PBS, a structured training plan that incorporates regular rest days is probably going to be a more effective option; as we’ve mentioned, there are many good reasons why elite runners do not run every single day. However, if your love of running is waning, or if you need the focus of something lofty and potentially redemptive in your life, a run streak could be just what you need. You may not become the next Ron Hill – or Raven – but running every day for a month, several months or even longer can have a galvanising effect on body and mind. Start today and who knows where a streak may take you. # RWRUNSTREAK For more info and inspiration on run streaking and to join the Runner’s World run streak, go to runnersworld.com/uk/run-streak.