I blame the weather. Seriously. I do.
I love to run outside. So much that I hadn’t run on a treadmill for a couple of years. But we moved back to Scotland, and I had to accept the need for a treadmill or risk my streak ending due to ice and hellish weather.
Little did I know, the weather wasn’t the biggest risk to my streak. I was.
But this isn’t about the weather. It’s about how I’ve been sabotaging my running for years by refusing to plan realistically. Let me show you exactly how a 1625-day streak nearly ended. Not because of ice or storms. Because of my stubborn insistence on making the same mistakes.
The pattern
First up is my inability (refusal) to set realistic goals.
I don’t like SMART goals. They don’t work for me. But then neither do most of the running goals I’ve set over the years. Training as a coach has made me realise that the issue is that I’m not specific enough, I don’t create an emotional connection.
My goals don’t need to be SMART exactly, but they need to have a why. They need to be specific. And they need to be quantifiable. Think ‘I want to run a sub-55 minute 10K’ as opposed to ‘I want to run a faster 10K’. See the difference? It took me a while to grasp it.
My other problem is setting a goal and forgetting it needs a plan to go alongside it. The plan includes mini goals, so you aren’t running blind. You have something to aim for and can see and measure your progress.
For some people it’s accountability. But, for me it’s more about creating clarity and having a plan.
Next up is my uncanny ability to ignore patterns. Particularly those of a self-sabotaging nature. I am a master at telling myself everything will be fine. That niggle? It’s just in my head. It has been there for weeks and it’s just annoying. Nothing some Ibuprofen and positive thinking can’t fix.
Doing things that should help me but in a way that ensures they don’t. That’s my other skill. I can see the road I’m headed down; I just stubbornly refuse to change direction. A little like someone who refuses to pay attention to the SatNav (yeah, I’m guilty of that too).
Nothing new
This wasn’t new. For around 15 years before my streak started, I had the same pattern: stop-start running. I’d get excited, train for a few weeks (badly), maybe sign up for a race, drag myself through it somehow, then disappear from running for months. Rinse and repeat.
I did run the New York Marathon in 2004. Slightly better trained but still chaotic. A few more half marathons, some 10Ks, another marathon. But every single time, same pattern: burst of enthusiasm, inconsistent training, willpower my way through race day, crash back to nothing.
Then I lost 23kgs and managed to run uninjured. So, I added CrossFit into the mix. Something else to do inconsistently. Something else that was telling me something that I could stubbornly ignore.
Then I added a daily streak to the mix. 1625 days of consistency. You’d think that would’ve fixed the pattern. It didn’t.
Back to the start
So, now we’ve got my personality quirks established, let’s rewind to the start of 2025. Out of the blue, on a whim, I decided to run a marathon in 2025. Just like that. I found a plan and worked out the day I needed to start. A 16-week plan. I wasn’t taking shortcuts.
The weather was horrendous. Stormforce winds. So, I took to our lovely shiny new treadmill. I completely forgot that treadmill running can be relentless and is often harder than road running (in my experience). Undaunted, I put in an hour one evening. I followed my plan. To. The. Letter. Only I didn’t. I’d completely misread what I was doing, despite the niggling pain in my lower leg trying to tell me.
I’d overdone it. And the weather was still bad (risk to life weather warnings), so the treadmill was still my only option. I had to ditch the marathon plan. I went back to banging out my daily 5K. Running to my mood, or how I felt, or what I’d eaten. Back to my daily streak with little thought or effort.
Same pattern. Different year. Although, in my defence, there was a time where I wouldn’t have understood defeat after only one week. Small wins.
Fast forward 5 months
Now it’s time to start training for my 10K with an eye on my half marathons that come later. Once again, I completely fail to acknowledge my tendency to be unrealistic. I ignore the little voice in the back of my head. I get a programme. An interesting programme with lots of different types of sessions, including my favourite: intervals.
My erratic CrossFit needs to get under control. I know that strength training will improve my pace. I committed to two sessions per week (whilst telling myself I’d actually do three). So, there I am, armed with a fabulous training programme and motivated to regularly turn up at CrossFit.
A week in, injury strikes. Noone is surprised. Except me. I ignore it for a few days. Until I can’t. Then I abandon my plan and focus on my streak. Still doing the odd CrossFit session and still planning on doing my 10K.
Do not do this at home. I lined up for my 10K and completed it. Running the whole way. How? I overlapped my Ibuprofen doses. Idiot.
A couple of weeks later I gave in and went to a physio. Bad bad news. I almost certainly had a stress fracture.
Reality hit. Hard.
1625 days of at-least-5K-a-day run streak. At risk. All because I couldn’t plan realistically. I tried to blame the weather. But it wasn’t the weather. I tried to blame life. It wasn’t life. It was all me. The thought of giving up my streak was killing me. Not the injury. The streak. Yes, I am a bit obsessive.
I agreed with the physio that I would run a slow flat mile to keep my streak going and give myself a chance at healing. I understood that the process would be much slower and may not work. It was also clear to everyone (again, I was lagging behind) that at least my first half marathon was also over.
Mindset
This shift in mindset was massive. Huge. 1625 days. I couldn’t get my head around it stopping. I really struggled until common sense almost prevailed and I dropped to a slow flat mile while I adjusted to the idea that my streak might be over. It wasn’t. It probably should’ve been. But it lived on. For 100 days I ran a slow, flat mile and eventually and gradually increased back up to 5K. All the while I was walking every day too. I need to be outdoors. It’s where I get headspace. It’s my happy place. But my walks were short. And slow. Even on dog sitting days. Our walks were short and slow and peppered with lots of furry glares and sideways looks. Beagles are outstanding at communicating their displeasure.
At some point, later than was ideal, I pulled out of my first half, then the second. Then I signed up for my local club 10K. I ran it. It didn’t hurt. It felt amazing.
So, what changed?
My instinct is to say nothing. I was backed into a corner and had to (almost) admit defeat.But that’s not entirely true.
I’ve been doing a lot of work this year on pattern spotting. I’ve become a life coach and a run coach and my approach is to spot patterns and work with them or change them to achieve consistency and hit goals. Through this process I’ve become more aware of my own patterns. This is not the first time I’ve increased training load and intensity all at once. So, I quit CrossFit. I’ll be back. But I’m going to work on my running, get some consistent training under my belt and then look to introduce some home-based strength training and then I’ll go back. I also need the time to be able to attend regularly.
2026. Same or different?
I’ve made my marathon decision a little earlier. I have time for a 20-week training plan and have no intentions of doing CrossFit. For now. But I haven’t committed to an event. I haven’t written my plan. I’m still on the fence. This means I have a vague goal and no plan.
So, have I learned?
Maybe. But what I do know is consistency doesn’t protect you from bad planning. My 1625-day streak didn’t make me immune to overtraining or unrealistic goals. It just gave me something to lose when those patterns caught up with me.
If you are a consistent runner who keeps getting injured, the problem isn’t your consistency. It’s that you’re consistently making the same mistakes. I know. I’ve spent 1700+ days proving it.
But, back to the point. My streak taught me to show up every day. But it didn’t teach me how to plan realistically, set achievable goals, or recognise when I was repeating the same self-sabotaging patterns. That’s the work I’m doing now. Not to run more consistently but to run more intelligently.
Because what’s the point of a multi-hundred day streak if every training cycle ends the same way?
I think I’m still figuring out the point. I’ve got a new niggle I’m ignoring. Right now, as I write this, I’m congratulating myself on not starting up CrossFit again, patting myself on the back for spotting a pattern and doing something about it. All the while ignoring another pattern trying to get my attention. One that wakes me in the night.
Old habits die hard. Let’s hope my streak doesn’t also die hard. At least now I can see the patterns while they are happening. That’s progress. Of sorts.
Struggling to set realistic goals? Book a call and we can talk through what’s getting in your way and how I can help you be more realistic in 2026.
