Run around the clock?

I’m strongly thinking of doing a thing.

On Saturday it’s the Longest Day, the Summer Solstice and all that. I’ve always wanted to do a 24-hour running event, and usually these are held to coincide with this coming weekend in June.

Obviously this year such events aren’t really possible, but Phoenix Running have got creative and are organising a virtual event. The idea behind it is to run a mile an hour on the hour for 24 hours, from 8am on Saturday morning every hour right through to 7am on Sunday.

It sounds fairly straightforward in theory but the reality will, I’m sure, be very different. I know it’ll be tough but, yet, I can’t get it out of my head.

I’ve unearthed a few YouTube videos of previous attempts with all but two giving up. That should be enough warning for me. And yet I keep getting drawn towards it.

I don’t really know what makes me think I’ll do any better. Even though it’s a virtual event it has precise rules and that perhaps sets it apart, it’ll almost feel like a proper ‘race’.

I do have a few tactics in mind to help me through the tough times, but I’ll expand on these in future posts.

Anyway, my planning began tonight with a bit of route plotting.

Due to the relentless nature of the event I don’t want to travel too far from home on each mile so, at the risk of the neighbours thinking I was somewhat deranged, I decided to see how many laps of my street it’d take to reach a mile.

It turned out to be either 10 or 11, I lost count, but that doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll be saving this ‘run around the block’ mile for the wee small hours.

After that I went slightly further afield to plot out another mile. I travelled all of 150 metres to the path that runs alongside the local playing fields to see how many up and down laps it’d take (plus the run back to my front door) to reach a mile. Three, it seems.

That was also slightly easier on my legs because it allowed them to open up a bit as opposed to the constant turning going around the six houses in my street – something to consider on the day itself.

I’ll use the rest of the week to plan other routes. I want to have a few to pick from in order to prevent (too much) boredom setting in.

It’s an exciting prospect, but also one that scares me, so I want to be as prepared as possible.