Two weeks ago I decided to set off on completing a 4x4x40 as part of some crazy ideas for my 40th birthday year. However, after I reached the 40 miles I felt like I really needed to continue as I figured at that point I might never do this again and get so close to hitting the real number and completing a 4x4x48 (run 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours). Maybe it helped that I was a bit sleep deprived at the time and not thinking clearly as I figured what was two more 4 mile runs at that point.

Since I posted after each of my runs with a short photo, time, and thought I will not rehash all of them. I don’t want to make light of this challenge as I think it was hard but the miles themselves weren’t the worst for me. Some of that could have been that I didn’t really have a pace per mile in mind. I obviously wasn’t going to try to run the fastest 4 miles I could every time. However, in my mind, I wanted to keep all of my averages per run under 9 min/miles. The biggest struggle for me during this challenge was trying to fit it in during a normal working day. Due to the weather forecast and maybe my last-minute planning, as it was December, I did it during the middle of a workweek. So I scheduled it out earlier in the week and pretty much created an appointment for myself every 4 hrs. It worked great the first day but the second day some things came up at work so I had to shrink down one of my 3 hr blocks of recovery and extend other ones. I still was able to get the run in that 4 hr bock but I wasn’t as consistently on the hour as I was the first day of running. In a way, I am wondering if working both days helped me keep my focus away from running and how tired I might have been as I was doing things I needed to do during the day. Then in the evenings I still helped get the kids to activities and stuff.

Now obviously the lack of sleep is one thing but the worst time of runs for me was the 5am runs that I did. I think it is because after the late-night 1am run it always took me longer than anticipated to fall asleep. You would have thought I would have been tired enough to just get into the house and fall asleep. I am guessing that the kick of adrenaline that was in my body messed with allowing my brain to shut down at that time. So for both days by the time I would will myself to sleep and it would work I think I only got 1 hr before I would have to wake up at 5am to run. After that run, I would just start my day and didn’t try to get any more rest as my youngest gets on the bus at 7am.

In the end, I have never run so many miles in two days. It ended up being 48.9 miles due to one run when I put my trust in a running friend who lead me astray by an extra mile. Those two days were more mileage than I had completed any week during my marathon training this past year. It was an interesting challenge as it took careful planning as I still worked and helped with kid activities like a normal day. It was just I ran every 4 hrs 😁. The day after I was done I felt pretty wiped out from most likely lack of sleep and over-exercise. Fast forward two weeks later and I am back on track. Maybe I will do another one of these challenges someday but probably no time soon. At least for the rest of this year, it will be back to the normal scheduled running for me.

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