My Journey to 500K: Running Challenges and Consistency

Ever since I started running again in 2020 during the Covid shut down I have been struggling to keep the momentum going over the year. I had set my yearly target in Strava at 500k but there always seemed to be something to make me ‘stumble’ and stop running for a while. So last year I set myself a target to run 55 times in the timespan of a year (birthday to birthday) to introduce some consistency in my running frequency. I did reach that target but without running 500k in that timespan. So for the next year I set my target to run some more each week instead of running at least once a week. And now, finally, yesterday I ran my 500th kilometre this year. I only started running again in March when the temperatures became agreeable again but ran almost every week except for 2 weeks in August when I was on vacation in Croatia and it was really too hot for me. On top of that I increased my minimum distance run from 5k to 7k and try to add a couple of 10k runs each months. That helped. Next year I am going to try to systematically run between 15 and 25k every week. If I can manage that then I should be able to reach 700k in a year easily.