The Clock Change Challenge

Running Every Day Through Winter

It can be difficult at the best of times maintaining motivation to train through the winter. Winter 2020 however is even more difficult – with the challenge of the pandemic meaning there are not necessarily events in the calendar to use to focus your training. To counter this, taking inspiration from Ronhill’s RunEveryDay challenge, at Ultra Training Club we have focussed on a challenge that the pandemic can’t stop from happening, unlike an event, simply running every day. The Clock Change Challenge is to run, every day, at least a mile, between the clocks going backward at the end of October, and going forward again at the end of March. You can keep up to date with progress of the challenge on our social media platforms and our youtube channel here.

If you want to try something similar to keep you running this winter – and the health benefits of ensuring you get out are immeasurable – here’s some top tips of how you can make it interesting…

• try plogging…. picking litter as you go so you can help clean up your community whilst running your daily mile
• try wrapping in errands – what shopping can you do or post can you drop off if you run with a pack? You could track how many miles of driving you save as well as how much you run…
• try finding a local outdoor gym – the target of your run could be a local park where you can use monkey bars or chin-up bars to build some upper body strength work into your daily leg stretch. I’m lucky to have a set of chin-up bars almost exactly half a mile away from where I live…

But most of all…. keep running this winter. The benefits of keeping moving and getting daily fresh air cannot be overstated. Find whatever motivation you need to get out there and keep on running.