Earlier this year I had a plan to run 40 miles with a really good friend of mine through the mountains of Colorado. We thought it would be fun to run 40 miles since we both turned 40 this year. Not to mention suffering together and probably laughing along the way made it seem like a feat that could be pushed through to accomplishment. The timing was not going to be great for me as it was one month before my Twin Cities Marathon but I was game to do it as it sounded amazing. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure how to train for such a thing but I just said yes and he said he would work out the details. The bummer is around May he hurt his ankle and knew the run wouldn’t happen. I was bummed that it fell apart but it probably worked out since I hadn’t run a marathon for 20 years and I wasn’t sure what I was in for. I am sure it probably wouldn’t have been great to come in not feeling the best from a 40 mile run through the mountains no matter how long it took us.

Fast forward to about 1 month before I ran the marathon and I stumbled across this concept of running 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours. At the time I didn’t know anything about it but thought that had a nice ring to it. However, the whole 48 hrs didn’t mesh with my goal so I figured I would modify it slightly to fit as a 4x4x40 instead 😁.

4 miles every 4 hours for 40 hours since I am 40 this year

That leads me up to now… After the marathon, I have been trying to take it easy and just running for pleasure but I feel like I have been missing something as I had hoped to do something else with this year 40. After pondering this for the last month, I realized that if I am going to do it I need to do it before it gets too cold in the night to complete this task so I am going to start tonight (or today) and we will see how this goes.

I do know more about the real 4x4x48 challenge and the guy who created it. However, my goal still has not changed. I will probably write about it as I go mostly just to document it along the way so I apologize to anyone not interested in this disregard my posts for at least more than 40 hrs from the first. Then we will be back to our regularly scheduled posting.

I don’t have any main goals in mind if you are wondering. My goal is probably to do as many of these 4x4s that I can in hopes to get to 40 but that is a lot of mileage for me in a short amount of time. Also, I am not concerned about my pace either except hoping I don’t go too fast at any point as that could screw things up. Either way, this is going to be an interesting experiment no matter how many I get done so we will see how it goes!

A final note for those interested, I am still working and getting kids to school and activities. So I am kind of treating this as just some breaks throughout my day and that is another reason why this time lined up perfectly. In the perfect world, I would only be doing this 40hrs with no other responsibilities. 🤷‍♂️