On December I hit a serious motivation dip and skipped most of my runs to the point where I just stopped running. So I thought I could do something fun and different on January. Well maybe not fun but more like stupid. For this month I decided to ditch any reasonable training plans and replace that with the Gregorian training plan.

See, I think Pope Gregory XIII was on to something when he came up with the Gregorian training plan in 1582. The planned distance of the run was marked on the calendar and for each month it started from 1 and ended somewhere between 28 and 31, depending on a month. I assume this a form of periodisation, alternating between easier and harder months.

For reasons unknown to me, people started to treat the kilometer numbers as the number of the day at some point and this misconception has remained until today. In fact, most don’t even know the real meaning of these numbers. Anyway, the first two weeks of January are over and I’ve covered distances between 1km to 14km. That was the easy part and yet I got a bit of pain on my right ankle this morning. Things are bound to get more interesting*.

So is it safe to ramp up distance like this? No. But does it good training? Also no. If I break the streak before the end of January, which is very very likely, I’ll end the project there. The second week made sense training wise but the rest, not so much. That being said, I’m excited about this silly project and it already got me motivated again and I’m curious to see where it ends!

* difficult, miserable