42/42 as of today with an average just above 5 miles per run. I missed 1 day due to illness but doubled up one of my runs that same week to cover the missed day. Coach and I are just working in easy 30 minute runs in between my normal weekly scheduled runs. I feel like the runs are starting to come easier now, whereas days 20-30 were a little harder to get out the door for. This past weekend I ran a half marathon and PR'd by over a minute. I also negative split the back half of the course (which I NEVER do). I am really looking forward to seeing how this plays out at the end. The challenge ends 1 week out from my first HIM of the year, so should be perfect timing to taper down to the race.

Finally 100 runs done in 46 days, with 500miles at a somewhat pathetic pace. With no rest day yet, the legs (or mind) refuse to run at normal pace. Anyway, each run contributes $20 to a charity (http://mariacristinafoundation.org/en/donate-2/), so all worth it.

That is fantastic. This may be a record in terms of duration to get to 100. Kind of like Wayne Gretzky's 50 goals in 39 games when the previous gold standard was 50/50! When is the cross Germany run and is there a charity for that. Maybe we can get Slowman to do an article on it.

Starting the challenge I was not planning to run much at all. Now I think I can get to 80 or even 90. I'm at 38/46.

I have had some really good progress with my nerve/disc related motor control and have gone from a really slow shuffle (I am talking like barely faster than walking....3.6 to 4.2 mph range at the start of the challenge) to slow jogging (4.5 to 5 mph pace) to jogging (6 mph pace). Now once I get warmed up, I am generally jogging at 5.5 to 6 mph and doing "intervals" at 7 mph. My foot drop with my left leg is getting lesser and I am able to dorsiflex a bit better and have a much stronger push off. I have caught myself getting carried away too many times and ratcheting up the treadmill passed 8 mph which I realize that I should not do since my cardio can write cheques that my legs probably cannot yet cash given that I am not totally running symmetrically yet. I have better coordination on uphill so there is a lot of running at 5-15% grade going on too

I am trying to focus every run on technique and rehab and not speed, but it's hard not to get carried away with chasing numbers on the screen. When you spent pretty well every year from age 6 to age 50 chasing speed and numbers and then have a year off and get back into it, well, it's really hard not to go back to the old mentality.

I got a second hand Woodwaytreadmill (taxes, shipped and installed in my basement for $3000 CAD) around a week ago and that thing is a god send. The deck gives more than a normal treadmill....the problem is I cannot wear cushy shoes, since I don't have full feeling in my left foot yet. If I wear vibrams, my coordination is almost right and gait fairly symmetrical, but I don't want to run too fast in them. If I wear really firm shoes, it's almost as good as vibrams. I got a pair of these Nike Flex which seem to be a happy medium....I would be happier if the toe box was a bit wider and more roomy, but so far they seem to be OK.

Honestly I have to say that a few times this last few weeks I started thinking I could get to 100/100, but then I am losing sight of rehab. In the last 24 hours I logged a 22 min jog late last night, a 30 min "harder run" this morning before swimming and another 20 min decently hard run after swimming. I was tempted to make each of the 20ish minute runs 30 minutes as that would be easy to do, but I thought the "harder thing to do" was to have the discipline to but them off and not chase the spreadsheet and focus on form. So I got one run out of 70 min of aggregate. It was the right thing to do, but the hard thing to do.

I think 80/100 should be possible if I stay disciplined. 90/100 would be in reach at the rate I am going. This is all really exciting.

Go for 88 Paul, that is a very lucky number here in Asia. All the best!

As for Run across Germany,..still finalising the date with my support crew, likely mid July.

Two more days till hump day (day 50).

Mandai, are you going to be the first ever to hit 200/100 ???? Keep it up.

Dev - have you tried motion control shoes?

I've been marathon training since Nov and had to upgrade my very old running shoes, as they finally got so old that my feet were literally tilting outwards due to the outer sole wear and I was getting outer foot pain worrisome for a stress fracture.

I got the Brooks Transcend 3 motion control shoe, and no joke - they almost immediately relieved all my stress fracture worries and achilles tendon strain worries. They're a motion control shoe, so not light, but compared to neutral shoes you definitely feel it track better when you're really fatigued and would otherwise have less accurate landings which can predispose to injury.

I have wide and super-flat feet - I need a wide toebox, and it sounds like you do to. I can run in pretty much anything as a lower mileage triathlete, but at the 70+mpw with a lot of quality, I'm finding the motion control shoes very worthwhile.

Might be worth considering since sounds like you've had your fair share of run injury problems - I know for sure if I were running on things like Vibrams or other low-padded shoes, no way could I maintain 70+mpw with plenty of fast work in there.

Hey thanks for the input. Actually with the nerve compression in my back there is a loss of feeling in my left lower leg. Imagine the diff between bare hands, gloves and mittens while typing (or doing anything moderately demanding that needs digital dexterity). The less I have on my feet, the better the connection up to my brain since the nerves are not feeding the full signal up and down efficiently. This is essentially my problem right now.....my mileage and general pace is so slow that low padded shoes are OK. I don't think I will ever run higher volume anyway (I guess I should never say never, less than a year ago, I had a neurologist telling me I'll never walk again without anti spasticity drugs and so far I am on the path to disprove him). Another neurologist diagnosed other causes, which I believe are right (disk damage, nerve compression, previous crash scar tissue all working against me). In any case for now "less is more" (all of less volume, less intensity, and less material on my feet). On todays treadmill run, I actually cycled through 4 different sets of footwear while running at 10-11 kph and the best coordination was in the hardest firmest padding (vibrams)....the Nike Flex's above were second best....next was my NB Minimus Trail. Last was Brooks Pure Connect.......just too soft.

Didn't see this thread til now. As of this morning I think i'm at 61 runs since 15 December? Think that puts me on pace for like 130ish runs and like 1000+ miles? Winter volume has been very steady and consistent and I have also been lucky enough to take four days off since the challenge started. Feeling very healthy and strong. First races are just a few weeks away.

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I'm at 62 runs through 49 days and feeling strong despite some nagging sinus issues that have been hanging around since new year's and caused me to miss some days. I have a trail half marathon on Sat and I think I'll take tomorrow and Friday off with only some easy spinning on a spin bike. I feel like doing Sat's race on fresh legs - usually don't take much time off before a race so I thought I'd try something new.

Good luck Dev on your quest for 80 runs (or even 90). It's good to see that you can run again.

Running 62 times and you're swimming/biking...dear god.

Good luck at the half.

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I am mostly just running now. I suffered through 2 years of low back/hip/it band, etc, etc injuries after my last tri - a half - and never went back. So now I just run with occasional rides or spin class and no swimming but I still follow along here and use the tracker and I try to do the 100/100 challenge when healthy.

We're at

DAY 50

I celebrated our mid point by taking the day off!

And today I got back into it with a magical run! I was teaching bike fit school at the mother ship and woke up at the desert compound HQ of Slowtwitch. It was snowing the mountains to the south, raining lightly above me and I was running into a rising sun in the blue to the east. A simply magical moment in the streak - one of many for all of us I'm sure.

Just so grateful to be moving and improving.

Ian

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Ian Murray
http://www.TriathlonTrainingSeries.com
I like the pursuit of mastery
Twitter - @TriCoachIan

OK you were at the ST Starship Enterprise zone and you did not flog slowman to come out and join you for the birthday set workout that he seems to be very stealth about?????? Please post pics from some of your runs!

great run today despite finding a bunny hole the hard way early on

an affirmative heel strike on bad leg has worked wonders this past week -- hip is coming online now with much greater stability.

Am a total convert to improvement through increments!

ugh.. i almost missed a day but went for bare minumum 15 min. caught a bad stomach virus. can eat. one week after having the flu.til ran/jogged everyday so far

Ughh, my legs are tired! As of yesterday I was at 64 runs/61 days--best I've ever done on the challenge. All of it done at a slow plod as I focus on consistency, not speed, and year four of a back injury recovery.

Dev, congrats on the progress. I know where you're coming from, and how challenging it can be. Thanks for sticking with the challenge in spite of it all.

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No coasting in running and no crying in baseball

Hey, guys, relatively good news. As of tonite I should be at 59/62. When we started the challenge I was unsure I would get to even 1 real proper run due to a 15 month long disk/spine/nerve injury. I had been making progress in October and November after a cortisone shot, but walking was still very tough...jogging/shuffling was equally bad.... but the "magic" happened when the snow came. I got out on snowshoes and did a combo or walk-run using poles to drive my legs since my upper body works fine....the legs followed the orders of my arms and since the snow was soft, the nerve compression was less of an issue. As time went on, my range of motion got better and better.

Imagine keeping your hand tense in a fist for 15 months and then being asked to open it....it's going to keep going back to closed....that with the scenario with my lumbar spine-pelvia-psoas-femus complex. As I did more snowshoe runs, I also got better and better at treadmill runs...initially I could barely shuffle at 4.5 mph without leg spasms and having to stop and stretch. Then I got up to 4.8, then 5, then 5.5, then 6 mph. Now I am going along at 5.5 to 7.5 mph in general from zero to 15% grade. The steeper it is, the easier actually from a coordination perspective....but harder aerobically and also need to be careful for the achilles....but I feel like I am less tense and running better. I have also graduated to a few outdoor runs on pavement (short ones....generally 15-20 min after doing 15-20 min on the treadmill warmup).


I am close to 100/100 pace but many of those runs are snowshoe runs. They are super duper hard aerobically and I am running the entire time, but I still "feel" like it is not the same as hard core on pavement, but as I said around 8 years ago to someone who asked if they could count snowshoe running, I said, "Well if you want to penalize yourself by adding massive weights to your feet and then run on quicksand, as long as you take flight on every stride, then you can count them". Still I feel personally that although aerobically harder and tougher on the hip flexors and hamstrings and glutes, it is easier on the quads, so it's not "quite" like real running, but I suppose it is no worse than those regular runs in knee deep snow on a snowstorm day that I used to count, except this time I have weights on my legs.

I think I can get to 100/100 with the snowshoe running + real running. Hey, I'm just trying to win a competition with myself. I did the first 100/100 in 2006 basically doing a competition wiith myself and EH and Jana joined in virtually. So this is a new challenge for myself. If I can get to 100/100 with around 20 snowshoe sessions and that makes my other 80 real runs viable, then fine. In my heart I know that I did 80 real runs and 20 snowshoe sessions and without the latter I would have never gotten to the former.....The snowshoe running is like range of motion and coordination physio for my real running.

Hi Kiki, I would like to share that 2 items have helped my foot drop/spasms and motion control. One is snowshoing....that appendage at the bottom of my foot forces the tibial nerve/muscle to engage. Second has been doing sit ups with my toes tucked under the couch and pulling up hard with my tibia at the same moment that the psoas engages.....basically trying to drive the connection between the two muscles and the big toe on the dorsiflex motion. I have also noticed that when I water run in the pool it's going better. I'm on the 1000 days of incremental improvement plan. My neurologist feels all this can be defeated in 18 months but to not expect magic fast. Also my jogging on the Woodway curve is better, but I can't quite dorsiflex fast enough for a good solid heel strike heel to toe action.....funny thing is the faster I go the better it gets....at low speed not bad...at fast speed when the leg swings through and there is a big push off from the other leg, not bad....mid range is where all the worst compensation is at. I put a mirror up in front of my treadmill at home to be able to watch my foot and try to force it into a correct orientation. It takes the mental energy of a soccer penalty kick on each stride on some days.

yes yes yes, it's getting the psoas to stop stabilising and synch up with the movement pattern

my heel started dropping more or less reliably, and effortlessly again once I (accidentally) relaxed a muscle below and medial to the scapula. It seems bonkers that it would be so high but that did the trick.

Holding head of femur in very light external rotation has also been key to better foot strike. Getting to first causes, i'm now wondering if all this started with entraining a clockwise rotation of femur to lock acetabulum into socket for the strike rather than a (proper) counterclockwise rotation.

the problems you describe with midrange mirror exactly my problems on the bike. I can spin at high rev reliably, and I can haul a pedal around in a big gear, but the midrange still flummoxes me. Probably because momentum and gravity can't help, it's pure strength. I'll keep talking to the psoas, and try the sit-ups, that's a great tip!

It's Feb 17 and I'm pretty sure we're at day 65.

I run perhaps half of my runs from my home/office. The majority of that run is in the Santa Ynez Canyon, a single track trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. I wanted to pay homage to this run in our 100/100 thread today.

There are some nooks of nature even in the brutal, endless pavement of Los Angeles

Zooming in a bit....


It's a very unusual wet winter here, it's raining now and we're supposed to get 5 inches (12.5cm) of rain today in LA today. The local news orgs have been hyping that to death year "STORM WATCH 2017!!!". Last night I wanted to sneak in one more quick run in the canyon because there's a creek to cross ~8 times and it'll be so flooded that I won't be able to cross dancing on the rocks like I do now.

Here's one of the crossings...


Here's another...


I've been running this canyon for over a decade and it is typically dry, brown, sandy - just desert. It's such a joy to run through the loamy smell of damp earth. I grew up in Colorado and miss that lush smell that we had in the monsoon summers in the Rockies.


Really enjoying the streak and I don't want it to end in 35 days.

Ian

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Ian Murray
http://www.TriathlonTrainingSeries.com
I like the pursuit of mastery
Twitter - @TriCoachIan

Yes, we are on day 65....unfortunately I am gonna drop a bit this weekend. I got through run 69 this AM, but have been fighting some L heel pain the last couple of weeks. Pretty much identical to the pain in my right foot in November, which my podiatrist said was a nerve entrapment. A shot of cortisone fixed it.

Saw same podiatrist today, diagnosed same issue. Ultrasound showed the inflammation along the nerve so I got a cortisone shot. No running for the weekend....which sucks because it is gonna be in the 60's here in Chicago for the next 4 days. Ugh...

So I'm gonna drop to only being 2 runs up vs. # of days, but hopefully this fixes the issue and I am good to go for the rest of the challenge.

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Am I the only one having issues with the Training Log? Can't access it.

Ditto

yep. so. no log... did i actually run? (I did. it shouldn't matter that I can't log it, but I miss entering something and seeing the results!)

:-)