The month of March proved to be an interesting one, the third month of the challenge required a little bit extra in kms covered underfoot to make up for the shortfall in February due to there only being 28 days rather than the 30 or 31 (it does make a big difference.

I started the month a little behind the 8-ball with the first weekday being a long weekend. Normally, this would be the ideal opportunity to make up some extra distance, however this one I didn’t do that due to being in Geraldton watching a soccer tournament over the weekend and deciding the extra sleep would probably be a better move before the four and a half hour drive home. While I did have reasonable runs on the Tuesday – Thursday of that first week, I was struck with some stomach complaints on the Friday which cuts my run short…first week down and already close to 24km behind where I wanted to be – not a good sign of things to come.

Heading into the second week, I still had belief that I could cover the distance and make the 625 goal for the first three months. I did some calculations and it worked out that I would need to average approximately 11kms each run and could not afford to miss any more – no pressure at all! This meant that an increase in distance would be required for the next three weeks, I accommodated for this by deciding to increase my four 12km days to 13kms each (adding an additional 4kms a week) but this would still result in me coming up short. The difference would have to be made up on my short run days where instead of doing 5km, I increased the distance to 10km. The doubling, I figured would give me some wriggle room if I needed it.

The additional distance was not the only challenge I faced throughout the month. March is a hard month to psychologically get around due to the noticeable change in light conditions in the early morning. At the start of the month, there is still a lot of light at 5:15am when I start running making it a lot easier to engage. However, by the end of the month I find that I am starting in darkness and quickly approaching the finishing in the pre-sunrise light. The inevitable months of non stop running in the dark well and truly makes itself known, the head torch needing to come out to ensure I don’t get run over by cyclists coming in the opposite direction.

There was one more unusual challenge / experience though. One morning in mid-March I was about 2km into my run, running on the shared path between the freeway and Canning River before Mt Henry Bridge when I heard a motorcycle coming towards me. I couldn’t believe my eyes as on the shared path was a motorbike doing approximately 70km per hour speeding along in the pitch dark. When I reached the Mt Henry Bridge I was stopped by a little old lady quite concerned for her safety due to the motorcyclist having sped past her while she was on the bridge. I assured her that the last I saw of the bike it was heading towards Canning Bridge and showed no sign of slowing down…

This whole experience is one that I never thought I would have while running early in the morning. I am grateful that I did have my headlamp on that day!

Despite all the challenges, I am please to be able to say that I managed to achieve the goal of 625km for the three months with one running day to spare, bringing up the distance on Friday the 28th of March.

My statistics for March were as follows:

April presents some interesting possibilities with endings as the Term One 450km Challenge comes to a close, and new beginnings with The 120km Easter Holidays Challenge, Term Two 450km Challenge, and April – June 625km Challenge all getting underway.

How I will manage all of this with the commencement of the hockey season (and what they did to my feet last year) will be a wait and see…it might be make or break time for 2025.

Two months down in my challenge and the continued experience of successes and challenges definitely continued. I find that February is the most challenging month of all due to there being less days to achieve set goals (28 days vs 30/11 days does make a big difference in the overall scheme of things). The way that the month fell I knew that at a maximum I had only 20 set running days, if I kept my usual routine of 53km a week, this would mean a maximum possible of 212km for the month which is just over the amount of 209km I need to run to keep on track. I needed to have a month with no complications… of well that didn’t happen.

In the second week of the challenge I hit the first hurdle, starting my run on the Thursday morning, I felt quite tight through my lower legs and my right ankle was quite stiff. I made the decision to pull out of my run. While thinking about the big picture is important, I knew that the repercussions were now I’d be sitting beneath the amount I needed to stay on track unless I pulled out some larger numbers later in the month.

Week three presented its own challenges. I was excited with some progress made, on the Wednesday I set a new PB over the distances of a kilometre, half mile and mile when I was doing my regular short run of just over 5km. This was followed by a great change of scenery run down in the Safety Bay / Shoalwater area along the coast. If anyone get the chance to do that, I would highly recommend it, lovely scenery and nice and flat. I thought that I was make good progress, however another hitch to the routine the following day. I ended up needing to visit the emergency room overnight and got zero sleep which resulted in another missed run on that Friday morning. That brought me to being down by 24km for the month going into the final week.

Not to be disheartened, I thought I would at least push to try and hit the 200km for the month by the end of Week 4. It would mean needing to run further than I would normally to get in the necessary distance. The week started with my usual routine and I completed 2 x 12.2km runs – this put me in the position of needing 39km from the last three days which I felt was manageable. Wednesday was the start of the increase, instead of my usual 5km run, I completed a 10.8km run. While this put me further behind (29km in two days) I still felt I could give things a good crack. On Thursday I increased the distance from my usual and completed 13.km which took me down to needing 15.2km on the final day.

Friday the 28th of February, the final day. I knew that I was falling short of the 209km needed for the month, however was still optimistic for completing my 200km for the month challenge – there was the added challenge of having a head cold and my head feeling pretty lousy. The run started at Lake Monger and I kept the usual route of then linking over the Herdsman Lake. As a got back to Lake Monger I brought up the 13km, as expected, from the circuit. Only 2.2km to go. I continued around Lake Monger to bring up the 14km before turning around and heading back by the same route to where I was parked. Upon completion brining up the 15.3km and ticking over the 200km for the month.

Where does this leave me in relation to the larger challenges?

The three month January – March Challenge I am currently sitting at 413.4km of the needed 625km meaning I have only 211.6km to do in March. I feel pretty good about this one! If I hit this target by the end of March then I will be on track for the larger goal of 2500km for the year, a quarter of the year will be down and I’ll have covered a quarter of the distance.

My statistics for February were as follows:

Looking forward to March and hitting a few of the medium sized goals that I had set for the year!

The first month of the challenge has seen amid of successes and challenges. I have managed to run the required distance for the month of over 209km by running a total of 213.2km over the month. While on a whole this is positive and included many memorable moment including getting to do a 13.5km run on Rottnest Island (my happy place), I didn’t get as many runs completed as I would have liked in an ideal situation by only completing 17 for the month. My usual running regime of running five days a week would result in me usually doing between 20 – 22 runs so I am really starting behind the 8-ball for the year.

My monthly statistics were as follows:

February will prove a new set of challenges with the commencement of the school year. A little more routine, but now there’s a need to balance the demands of my teaching position with the running regime – always a challenge!

On the back of my success in 2024 with the “2024km in 2024 Challenge” I have decided to up the expectations in 2025 by challenging myself to run 2500km in 2025. While I know that this will be a little bit of a stretch and will definitely challenge my endurance over the year, I know that it is something achievable, that is, as long as I stay uninjured!

I have decided to approach this BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) by breaking it down into smaller targets to hit over the course of the year as follows:

Goal 1 – Three month targets.

In breaking down the goal, I have set a smaller target to hit every three months which will be equal to a quarter of the overall total. This means I will need to run 625km every three months. I have broken the three months challenges up as follows: January – March; April – June; July – September; October – December.

Goal 2 – Term targets.

While setting three month targets is great, I find that having the definitive end can be a danger in providing a full stop to where I am up to. I have overcome this by continuing my “Term Running Challenges”. Each school term I am going to aim to run a minimum of 450kms, this will create an overlap with the three month goals.

Goal 3 – Monthly targets.

While having the above medium sized goals is great, they are still a little too big. To overcome this, I will break down the goals even further into “Monthly Goals”. I need to run 209km a month to achieve the goal of 2500km for the year. Each month I tend to run more than this, so I am going to continue with my “200km Challenge” for each month.

Goal 4 – Weekly targets.

This last goal is the most important one, the one that if I focus on all the above will be achieved. Calculating out the kilometres I need to run each week is around the 48km mark. I am going to aim to run 53km each week, this being similar to what I have run previously. The runs will be broken down into 2 x 12km runs on the first two days of the week, 5km run on the middle day, and 2 x 12km runs on the next two days followed by two days rest.

Looking forward to what’s ahead.

This year’s challenge is a really exciting one. I am confident that it will be possible to achieve but it will take a considerable amount of planning, commitment, and a little luck to stay uninjured! I am going to aim to write one post a month as an update into how the challenge is going.

Here we go – bring it on!

I set out at the beginning of 2024 with what I thought was a pretty significant and challenging running goal for the year, to run 2024km in the 2024 calendar year.

I knew, given my previous running efforts and the distances that I had been running, that it was inside the realms of possible but it would take dedication and consistency throughout the entire year (something that hasn’t always been there over such a long period of time).

Despite the year starting off really well, there were some significant challenges that arose in the middle part of the year – injury. In April I started having pain in my right foot which kept getting worse. After seeing a podiatrist and having scans done it was discovered that I had torn my plantar fascia with there being a 1.5mm tear near where it connected in my heal. Interestingly, this wasn’t from the running but from going back to play hockey and having the wrong sort of shoes, the soles were too soft and didn’t provide enough support). In addition to this, I strained my hamstring on two separate occasions, again playing hockey…maybe there is something in that I should have considered when having my goal! What this meant is that having being able to run over 1,000km in the first four months of the year, I was only sitting at the 1280km at the beginning of October. At this point, I had two choices – abandon the goal or find a way to go for it and see what happened. I chose the latter.

The final three months of every year I have decided to repeat an additional challenge called “the 90 day challenge” where I try to run 700km in the final 90 days of the year. If I managed to do that in 2024 it would take me just short of my final goal of 2024km so there was some additional incentive. The challenge started off reasonably well, with me running 216.8km in October. I was pretty happy with this effort as it was the first month I had been able to run over the 200km mark since April and it was done with no pain. It did, however, set me behind the km rate I needed per term to reach the goal which would mean increasing the kms in the last two months.

November proved a great turning point for me and another challenge helped me significantly in my efforts – participation in Movember. The school that I teach has participated in Movember for the last few years and I was asked to organise the school team for this year. Movember is a charity that raises awareness for Men’s Health, unfortunately too many men die young due to not looking after themselves and their health. As well as raise money and grow a moustache, it is possible to set a physical challenge. I used this to set the challenge of running 250km in the month of November which I announced at a staff meeting to the entire school community. This was a big goal for a few reasons: 1) I had only ever managed to run 250km on one other occasion and that was during school holidays; 2) November only had 30 days making it a shorter amount of time. The task went well, but I got to the final running day and needed to complete a 21.2km in order to reach the goal. Under the encouragement of a good friend, who joined me for the last 11km of the run, I undertook a different running route to reach the goal as I started in Attadale and ran back towards the South of Perth Yacht Club in Applecross before turning around and running back to Leighton Beach on the coast. This took me to a total of 253.1km for November and a total of 469.9km for the challenge – a big December was going to be needed.

I entered December hopeful of being able to not only reach the goal of 700km in 90 days, but also now feeling confident of possibly attaining the 2024km in 2024. Success would depend on a few variables, mainly me staying disciplined throughout the month and not getting injured. The month started well, the first week was the final week at school which helped me setup a good routine and structure with the early starts. I ran all five days including four runs of 16km each and one 12.5km run, a solid effort. The next two weeks saw my running route change with us going on our holiday to the town of Denmark in the Southwest of Western Australia. I knew that this time would make or break the challenge and committed to the early morning starts, running not every morning but seven of the ten days we were away and increased my distance up to 18km per run. Upon our return, in the lead up to Christmas I kept this rate going completing two 17km runs before a shorter 13km run around my holiday route of Lake Monger and Herdsman Lake. The final of these runs on Christmas Eve took me past the 2000km. Unfortunately, at this point my calves tightened up and I had to take the next four days off. The final three runs of the year were an 8.4km run followed by an 11km run (this took me to the goal of 2024km) before finishing the year on New Year’s Eve with an 11km run.

The 2024 year is now done and my stats for running are as follows:

The feeling of accomplishment I have for being able to complete this challenge is hard to put into words. In doing this challenge I have learnt many valuable lessons about myself and what it means to overcome challenges and adversity and a lot of negative speak from others. So many people told me that I wouldn’t be able to do this and joked that I was setting myself up for injury.

So where to from here?

2025 starts tomorrow and I need to set myself some new goals to achieve running wise. Reflecting on my strengths, having smaller achievable amounts seems to work well with me achieving a bigger overarching goal. One thing is for certain, I want to set myself an even bigger goal – something that seems impossible unless it takes 100% commitment. I won’t be just trying to run 2025km, but rather will aim for 2500km.

Looking forward to hitting the pavement again tomorrow.

A new day, a new year, a new challenge awaits.

The running challenge is rapidly approaching two weeks since commencement and so far I am feeling quite confident with its progress. Despite it being early days, I am feeling quite optimistic and confident into how it is going.

This week marked the commencement of Term Four and with this, the challenge kicked up a gear with me completing my full running load from pre-injury for the first time since May. I have managed to complete 53.3km over the five runs on “Bridges Course” between Mt Henry and Canning Bridge along the river. The weather this week has been stunning and the sunrises over the waters of the Canning River breath taking to behold. My times haven’t been anything to write home about, the average time being 5’56” for the week with the fastest being 5’48”. However, this doesn’t bother me as I am focusing on the consistency, injury prevention and overall distances covered for this challenge – it’s not a matter of times.

Today (Saturday) is my first rest day for the week and I feel like I need it with my calves feeling quite tight despite the stretching and strengthening exercises that I have been doing. I have had the compression socks on all day to try and provide a little faster recovery. Hopefully, come Monday I will be ready to go again with another big week.

One thing that I will need to look at addressing is my distance deficit for the larger goal – running 2024km in 2024. I have calculated that I am going to need to an additional 5km for eleven weeks if I will make this goal by the 31st of December. I am going to take some time to think about the best way to make this happens – by next post I will have a solution (I hope).

2024 has seen me undertake a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) regarding my running – to run 2024km in the 2024 calendar year. I have been asked by many people why I am doing this, and in all honesty there is no specific reason other than to:

• Set myself a goal of some sort to work towards.
• Push and challenge myself.
• It sounds really cool.

The challenge came to bear off the back of my 90 day challenge at the end of 2023 where I attempted to run 700km over the last 90 days of the year (2nd October – 31st of December). While I didn’t achieve the goal, only managing 580 odd kms, the efforts especially over December where I managed two run 250km made me think that it might be possible to really stretch myself in 2024 and see what happened.

I decided that the best way to achieve this goal, like any big goal, wass to break it down into smaller challenges / targets for me to try and achieve. I did this by setting myself the monthly challenge of running 200kms and then an slightly larger challenge of running between 400 – 500km over the course of a school term depending on the number of weeks of the term. To review the progress, I am going to break it down into reviewing these term challenges.

January:Summer Holidays.
 I made the decision that I wanted to get off to a good start over the January period before school went back. Off the back off the good work in December, I knew that keeping the momentum going was important through building consistent habits around when I would run each day, early in the morning before it got hot, and the frequency of runs, keeping to my five runs a week like I would in the school term. I didn't quite manage the five times a week due to running several longer runs (+21 kms) but still managed to complete 17 over the course the month seeing me start off with running 233.4kms for January.

Term One: February – March.
The beginning of Term One saw me undertake three different challenges, my monthly 200kms required for both February and March and the larger Term Challenge which was set at 400kms for the term. Term One was a nine week event due to where Easter was falling, I figured that working towards the 400kms would give me a little bit of wiggle room for if I pulled up sore on a day. Term One went really well, I managed to complete 231.4km in 21 runs over the month of February with me committing to a running routine of 12km for Monday and Tuesday, 5 km for Wednesdays, and finishing with 12kms for Thursday and Fridays.
March was another successful effort, completing 219.8km over 20 runs with me managing to keep the same level of consistency in run lengths and frequency. I did manage one longer run of 21.47km on the March long weekend which, unbeknown to me at this time would prove to be the last extended run that I have completed this year, I will touch on the reasons later. The combined efforts of February and March saw me achieve the Term One goal of 400km, running 513.9km throughout Term One.

Term Two: April – July

Term Two saw me start with great enthusiasm for what was to come. I was making great progress towards my goals being up towards the 800km by the beginning of April, well on target. I decided that the goals and approach from Term One had worked so this would continue into Term Two – 200km expected per month as well as a larger medium goal, this time 500km for Term Two with it being an 11 week term. All manageable, that is until injury crept in which it did.
Interestingly, everyone I told about my challenge said I would get injured from over doing it, however it isn’t the running that cause me problems but rather me going back and playing field hockey. I decided it would be great to pick up the stick and play Masters Div 1 for the local club and I felt great during the game. That night and the next day, however, I could barely walk with it taking a few days before I could put weight back on my feet. Despite this April still saw me hit my target of 200km, coming in at 202.9km but I knew that something was wrong which resulted in me going to see a podiatrist to work out what was wrong with my feet.

The podiatrist suggested me go and have some scans and tests done as my symptoms were inconclusive as to whether it was plantar faciaiitis. I took some time off both playing hockey and running due to the pain levels I was experiencing plus work commitments which resulted in me having the first month this year where I did not reach my target of 200km, instead completing 160.3km. This downward trend continued throughout June, only completing 110.6km resulting in me falling short on the Term Two challenge only managing 401.3km rather than the hoped 500km.

Term Three: July – September
I was still in good spirits about making the overall goal of 2024km in 2024 despite the setbacks of Term Two. Heading into the Term Two holidays, I knew that I was still ahead of schedule and that if I could seep consistency in running, even if reduced in load, that I would make it due to the additional kms I banked early in the year. That was, until I tore my hamstring on the first weekend of the holidays playing hockey. Luckily, it wasn’t a bad tear and it only ended being three weeks of not being able to play, but that was another 150kms that I wouldn’t complete, and then when coming back I would have to gradually build back up which would cost me even more kms and eat away that surplus I had worked on. I decided to use this time to get my right foot sorted out, got the necessary scans and got diagnosed as having a tear in my plantar fascia. While this sounds really bad, it meant the all of a sudden I could have it treated and the rehabilitation start – lots of strapping, stretches, strengthening exercises, inserts for my shoes and new hockey shoes were all required. While I am still having some difficulty with this, everything is heading in the right direction as a commit to my regular twice daily routines and exercises that have been set up. The distance covered over Term Three was minimal which has now put a lot of pressure on me in the backend of the year. July saw me only complete 3 runs in total at 16.4km and 5 runs in August totalling 30.1km.

September has seen me start to be able to build some kms back into the legs. I still only managed to complete 72.9km for the month, however there are promising signs with me now having build up from only doing 5kms a day to increasing to 8kms for the first week of the Term Three holidays before now extending up to 10kms a day in week two of the break. My aim will be back to the routine I did in Term One come next week.

As I move into the remainder of the year I still have hope in achieving my goal. I currently sit at having completed 1,288km for the year which is behind where I wanted to be. However, I still believe that it is possible to complete the 2024km challenge with the time left. Tomorrow is the 2nd of October which will be the beginning of the 90 Day Challenge_2025 in which I will aim to run over 700km in the last 90 days of the year. I will break this down into both my monthly and term challenges (200km for the months of October, November, December, and 450km for Term 4 which is November and December).

I am already looking towards the final week of the challenge and the prospect that I may need to run my furthest distance ever on the last day to achieve the goal. Who knows, if I have 42.2km to go on 30th of December it may mean me needing to complete my first marathon distance to achieve the 2024km in 2024. Wouldn’t that be a blast if that was the case.