500 Mile Challenge

At the start of the year I was looking to give myself a small running challenge to motivate myself into increasing my running both in number of runs and length of run. After chatting to some friends I decided to go for 365 miles in a year which was achievable but also allowed for some time off due to holidays and any possible injuries.

I decided to mention it to the guys I regularly go running with (both better runners than myself) and they decided it was a good idea but 365 was a bit too easy. The 365 mile challenge was replaced with the 400 mile challenge. We decided to log this on Endomondo so we could track each others progress but found that someone had already posted a 500 mile challenge. This led to the 365 mile challenge becoming the 500 mile challenge.

It worked out at roughly 9 miles a week which is a mile more than what I usually do after completing two 4 mile runs at lunchtimes. It was good motivation so we upped our normal run to 5 miles so that we would be completing 10 miles a week on average. So far I am just about on track but I had to clock ~70 miles this month to make up for the short fall I had in January due to the birth of my son.

I also bought some new trainers for some extra motivation and finally ditched my 10 year old asics that had about 1000 miles on the clock. I went for the asics fuji es trail shoes as most of the running I do is on tracks in the forest. The shoes are really comfortable and have the usual asics excellent fit and are a lot lighter than my old shoes. 

For trail shoes they are great with good grip but the only gripe I have is that they should really be a lot more waterproof to be true trail shoes.