Today marks the start of the second half of December and that I’m half way through #REDBED. It is also the 47th day in my somewhat extended run streak.

A recap on #REDBED

I thought I would start today’s post by looking backwards.

Over the last 16 days, I have run 98 miles and gained 1990m in elevation. Smashrun gives most of the stats at a glance (it doesn’t appear to do elevation which I’ve dragged across from Strava):

So as you can see, most of the runs are around the 3-4 mile distance, with Tuesdays and Saturdays being longer. On Tuesday, I generally run twice, whereas I tend to do my longest weekly run on a Saturday. The most/least often run day is erroneous; December started on a Friday and so we’ve had 3 Fridays and Saturdays so far, and two of the rest. Quite why it singles Monday out I don’t know.

Now the Run Up 2 Christmas challenge is measured in KM rather than miles. Converting 98 miles gives 158km which means I’ve passed the 150km medal limit. My original aim was to get to 150km and then see if I could reach 200km; with 9 more runs to go, I’m confident that I’ll be walking away with the 200km. The top distance (250km) is perhaps a bit out of reach, but I’ll do a rain-check on 20th December to see how the numbers stack up and then go from there.

And I have ‘unofficially’ passed the 1000 miles for 2017. It’s unofficial in my mind because it includes my hike up Snowdon and a couple of nearby peaks in January. As such, Strava has included it, but Smashrun hasn’t. As I use the data from Smashrun as my ‘official’ statistics, I’ve got a little more work to do:

I’ve a 10k route to mark out tomorrow, so hopefully then the 1000 mile challenge will be properly complete.

At the end of the #REDBED Challenge, I’ll have a look at the totals for the month as well as the combined distance for the full run-streak!

Today’s Run

As Saturday is the early morning long run day, that’s exactly what we did! Unfortunately although I had my camera-phone with me for the run, the cold weather got to it this week and it refused to take any pictures before switching itself off!

The weather this morning was wintery. Again! As we headed out along the Middlewood Way, it started to snow. We did a reverse route of some of last week’s run before adding a few more bits of trail that I’ve not done before, interspersed between large sections I knew well. As I mentioned in #REDBED Day 9 it is wonderful to go for a run led by another person as I get to find so many other bits I’d otherwise not know about. Not that many of those sections were easy underfoot. Either they were rock-solid ice, or  a thin layer of ice above freezing cold, but liquid, mud!

Here’s our route: