Really?

I (probably) won't even get to 70 runs (again), but that hasn't stopped me from entering the past three years and again this year. It's something to do, and sort of a fun way to get out the door and run on some cold winter days.

But now you've got me fired up! This year, I'm going for the Bronze!

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

In terms of marketing, I am suggesting that rather than worry about who in the ST community is already doing 100/100 or not doing 100/100 there is a 1000x community of worldwide runners who we can draw both to ST and into the challenge. Often the progression of becoming a triathlete for an age grouper is getting off the couch to do a 5km and 10km and then a half and full marathon and along the way people get tickled by the idea of "NOW I WANT TO DO A TRIATHLON". Worrying about 100 emails from a few coaches seems like trying to grab pie crumbs from a market growth angle when there is global community of runners to get thru to and pull in.

This will bring new people into slowtwitch. So let's get these people over here.

Now let's get out and go run in prep for 100/100 or 90/100, or 80/100, or 60/100. All options are good. Just get out and run. Ryan how many miles did you run last week? (you seem to be avoiding any answers relative to your previous amount of participation and you current prep)....if you run more now you won't fall off later.

Ryan, is that the fault of the challenge or the fault of the slowtwitch leadership or the fault of the athletes if a bunch of athletes think that way. I don't think it is the fault of anyone but mainly it is the fault of the athlete.

I will be targeting 800km over the duration. it may end up by 70x11km, 60x~13km, 100x8km, 120x~6.6. If weather sucks where I live or work gets in the way, I will adjust things. But its not a failure by any means if I don't get to 100.

100 just means i got out the door and that's what the intention was. Here I am having done the challenge all years when i could run and wasn't coming out from being run over by a bus or another catastrophic acciident saying that any number of runs is a success. But you're implying (with Editor in Chief label beside you) that less than 100 is a success.

This is the glass half full view. With your leadership role at ST you can proclaim how all levels are a success. That's what I am trying to do with no formal authority around here. its like the CEO of a company when they leave the company. The new guard has to steward the company. The old leaders of the challenge can only convey the values.

Look at your poll though and look at who ran with their feet.

My personal running is irrelevant to the discussion at hand..

We have low hanging fruit -- the approximately 80% of people who visit Slowtwitch already but aren't either forum members or the 95% who aren't users of our training log. Let's work on converting them before branching outside of ST. So these are people that are most likely to already a.) know what the challenge is, and b.) decline to participate whether on the advice of their coach, or some other barrier that they have. That's the nut I care about cracking for now.

Slowtwitch has a reputation within the triathlon community of being, and I'm being charitable in my description of it, somewhere between the LetsRun forums and 4chan. Some of that is misplaced. But, well, we went through a spell there of long-time members being incredibly toxic towards newcomers and not listening to what new voices may have had to say. Dan will be the first one to tell you that we have pruned the tree back a bit. But it takes time for people to notice. The people that visit Slowtwitch are more diverse than ever. Our forum and training log participation is less so.

So when a sizable swath of our existing forum population says "my athletes, who lurk at the site, ask about the challenge, and I'd prefer if the challenge were X instead of Y," I'm inclined to give that argument a fair bit of weight. Because we could use new forum members. New voices. New perspectives. All who already know about Slowtwitch, and just need that little nudge to come play in the sandbox.

I have editorial pipeline that will serve the purpose of reaching beyond triathlon. There's a few that will likely require me to don my fireproof suit. But...I'm probably not doing my job if I haven't pissed somebody off lately.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Ryan, why would you not want to branch outside ST to make it bigger ?

Also if those coaches want to influence the challenge tell them to get on here and participate in th discussion. It is a forum for a reason. To exchange points of view. If they don't get on here then their points of view don't have weight.

Slowman put up a poll and your view and that of the coaches is not the majority anyway!!! I also have a sizeable swath contacting me and supporting the challenge the way it is but they don't count because they are voicing publicly here.

Your personal running just like mine or anyone's personal running is absolutely integral to the challenge. The entire idea is seeing what others are doing to motivate each other which is why we force them to use the log. I asked you because I want YOU to train to get ready for the challenge so you can't give us excuses later (call it some tough love)....no whining get your shoes on and let's go run everyone !!!

Thanks for clarifying the background on coaches and your desire to make 100/100 achievable by all their new athletes.

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Sharon McN
@IronCharo
#TeamZoot
Clif Bar Pace Team 2003-2018

People who think that haven't spent much time on LetsRun or any time on 4chan. This place could be more friendly, but it isn't close to that dumpster fire and cesspool.

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The first time man split the atom was when the atom tried to hold Jens Voigt's wheel, but cracked.

Dev, it's not a matter of not wanting to. It's more just speaking to my own bandwidth -- and trying to focus on growing a specific audience that already has a decent amount of brand awareness. I have a broader strategy in place to grow ST from outside of our normal pathways -- you've probably seen a couple hints at it in some of the events we've chosen to cover over the last 18 months -- but more to come on that front.

I also disagree that you need to be on the forum in order for your voice to have weight, or participate in a specific thread. The forum is but one method of communication. If I wanted to see what we're doing wrong I just need to check our Facebook comments. :)

As you can probably guess, polls are even a smaller subset of voices. They may reflect the views of registered users. But as we all know, polling can be flawed. I'm not going to disagree that the majority of past participants in the challenge, who are the ones most likely to be voting right now, are the ones who do not want to see the challenge changed. And look, fine, OK. I'll take the L. But I also need for us to at least be having the discussion about changes over the medium to long term. Maybe it's a secondary challenge. Maybe it's modifying the 100/100 rules. Maybe it's throwing everything out and starting over.

My broader point was that my running isn't integral to the rules discussion. But if you have to ask, if I race at all in 2022 it'll be a running race, and I'm wear testing shoes at the moment. But it's really going to depend on what my brain doctors want me to be doing.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

OK, now I see that what you want to do is focus on growing ST and the challenge is one tool related to that. I don't think the challenge needs to grow, but I don't have the objective of growing ST as an entity at a personal level (if slowman gave me that as a price for my suscription then I have to do that to keep the subscription)

Having said that I have been around multi sport much longer than you and my observation is that multi sport events grow from pulling in single sport athletes, or just athletes from other sports like soccer, or tennis, or hockey etc etc....or from "exercisers" (not performance athletes in the traditional sense but active people about to take on a sporting journey). This is where we grow the sport from. Thus I think ST can grow itself and the sport in general with an outreach to single sport and the top single sport to feed us has traditiionally been running. So 100/100 (or 60/100) can provide an awesome conveyor belt to bring runners over.

my 2 cents having raced around the world in something like 15 countries is that very few athletes have coaches. Most adult athletes are self coached.

On my side my coach says that I should not get caught up in the challenge and just focus on running 50-70km per week through the winter depending on if a week has a longer run or a longer XC ski. She is telling me that if I want to do well at St. George 70.3 Worlds (my first worlds in 7 years) and do my first Ironman in 7 years, I better respect the distances and not get caught up in bogus frequency for the sake of frequency. Get the miles in, get the hill work in, do some speed work. She trusts me that I will take care of the big picture and not let the challenge hijack the big picture. But I am experienced at this and my coach trusts i won't get out of hand. You won't hear from her though. I pretty well report in daily and I just got told to stop stalling and get a smart trainer (since my biking has nearly been zero this month)

Ok two more weeks of pre season training. 14 week regular season begins in two weeks (kind of like the old NFL regular season) .

Get yourself into whatever repeatable routine you can !

Getting to the daily start line is the victory. Good things happen from there. Now is the time to start getting organized !!!

I voted for "Either" because I'm now old and slow(er) and injury prone and well aware that I'm not likely to hit 100 runs, even if it is only 2/20. But I'm going to give it my best shot.


After following this discussion over that last few days, I have an idea... Why not simply rename the challenge? Instead of "100 runs in 100 days", how about "100 Day Run Challenge"? ...or "The Annual Slowtwitch 100 Day Run Challenge For The Purpose of Encouraging Increased Run Frequency in the Off Season" if you're not into the whole brevity thing. Thus removing the pressure(?) of chasing "100 runs" from the title, while keeping the target levels and rules as they are.

Or don't change a thing, I'm good with it one way or the other.

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__________________________________________________
Happy trails,
Chris

Ok, to clarify for a decaying mind and body: If I run for 30 minutes but can only cover 2 miles for example. Does that count as one run? I hadve been under the impression that in the past the 3/30 rule was a minimum of 3 miles in a minumum of 30 minutes. If it is 3 or 30=happy day

i agree that the way this challenge is been ''promoted''. it s more of a "100 Day Run Challenge"? ...or "The Annual Slowtwitch 100 Day Run Challenge . 100/100 to me suggest one acceptable outcome. it s a very elite level challenge. nothing wrong with that. now... not sure if changing the name would change the participation level. perhaps less intimidating??

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

This is the first year I have heard about the challenge, and I interpreted the announcement of it as basically just try to run every day for 100 consecutive days. After reading the rules, I get that there are all these details like what counts as run and what about if you run 2x on one day and skip the next and so forth, but...the general concept still seems (to me) like you just try to run every day for 100 days straight.

Nice

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

yes, that is called the "purist" rule. you can advance this challenge anyway you want. for instance on year i did my own rule of 100 consecutive runs all under 5km-min pace. or 30 sub 20 min 5ks in 30 days. You can make it as hard as you want. Making it harder will likely ensure you meet the minimums here

I would likely disagree with that in any general sense. I don't recall your 5k-pace thing working out so well. Making it harder without proper justification, and physical basis....will just be a recipe for injury. Given that only about 20% even make it to 100/100, and only about 10% significantly exceed the 100 runs total....most of the participants don't have either of those two things, and should just focus on following the rules as written (and maximizing usage of rules like #12 that allow for making use of shorter runs).

It didn't workout long term,but I hit the 100/100 still as by product. Failure was mental burn out, but successfully tied old PR,did not break it. After that just did easy runs for a good while

https://coupleofathletes.wordpress.com/...eryday-under-20-min/

I 100% appreciate your perspective on it. We both want the same things. Just different approaches, is all. And I also appreciate that this thing is, for all intents and purposes, your baby.

Now, onto the real purpose of this thread: THE GRIEVANCES, DAMMIT!

• Remind me the next time I move to go somewhere south that still has winter. This whole "it's not light till 7:30 AM" thing is bullshit.
• My fitness is a mess. I have two speeds: on or off. Right now it's mostly off.
• I had to spend the better part of three months not doing anything this summer. Not exactly a banner way to get into shape.
• The limited fitness I have is on the bike, and that's just from towing the kiddo around in her Burley from time to time.

I suppose I just need to get moving. Let's bank as many days as possible so I can go into my winter ski trips (going to Utah and Colorado this winter) in as best a shape as we can.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Next week it will be light an hour earlier in the morning, if that helps at all?

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Still too late most days.

Colorado is the current leader in the clubhouse.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Not when you're an evening person, like me.

<<Sigh>>

I suppose it doesn't matter though, since I injured my Posterior Tibialis on my long run Saturday. First running injury in 4 years.

Do your ankle exercises, people!!!

<<sigh>>

Well, after Dec 21, the sun will start setting later in the evening, if THAT helps at all?

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

We need to work on your definition of "help".

Sure, it helps....eventually. Somewhere around 15 Feb, it will be light enough again in the evening to run after work.

In these cases, I'm trying to make things seem just a little less awful

Sorry if I failed you

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin