A look back our very first challenge

I’ve been keen to put a blog on the 365 Challenge website for quite some time. I don’t intend to post here regularly or to have many common themes, but from time to time it’s nice to have a place for us to share thoughts or ideas that don’t fit in a Whatsapp message.

For the first blog post I thought it would be interesting (for some) to take a trip back through memory lane to revisit the first incarnation of the challenge. It’s safe to say we had no idea it would carry on developing and growing when we first started it – it was genuinely meant to be a one year event. So let’s look back and see how it developed.

At the end of 2016, I was looking for a new year’s resolution, that would help me get fitter in 2017. At the time we had two young children and exercising had not been a big focus – I was out of shape. I’d read an article that Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, had started his own “year of running” challenge in 2016 by running 365 miles. I’d been inspired by that and thought I could do worse than emulate it. I’m terrible (as most of us are) at keeping resolutions so thought it best to tell to my friends that I had decided to commit to this specific goal. So over lunch in an Italian restaurant in Birmingham (Prezzo’s maybe?) at Christmas time I announced the big idea. And to my surprise the others said they quite fancied doing it too. We agreed it would be quite nice to support each other.

I wasn’t confident of 365 miles so I committed to doing 365 km instead (and I prefer SI units anyway 😊), but other hardier souls said they would go for the full-fat 365 miles. So straight off the start line we’d already sowed the seed for differentiating the challenge based on personal ability which has been a mainstay of the challenge ever since.

I hastily threw together an Excel sheet so I could track my runs and emailed it to the rest of the group so they could do the same. It was fun (in a nerdy kind of way) and kept us all going.

At the end of 2017 we got back together at the same Italian and announced the results. Jenboss and I printed certificates and handed them out. We agreed it would be fun to do it again… HQ was born!