I Started Running - My 100 Day Progress

A little over three months ago, I decided to start running distance consistently. Was this completely cataclysmic to my gains, or did some things happen that I did not expect? How has my approach to running evolved over these last three months, and what have I learned and discovered upon this journey? Let's have a look. But you gotta focus. So when I first got into running this year, it was doing a hybrid athlete challenge video, and I jumped right in, trying to run as much distance as I could while still trying to lift heavy weights. I made a whole video covering that week journey. It was actually pretty exciting and pretty adventurous in my opinion. If you haven't seen that already, check that out. But before I jumped into this first week of running, at least in 2024, I hadn't been running much. If I was lucky earlier in the year, maybe like two miles a week at most, and that was kind of broken up. It was very inconsistent. I never put my heart into it. I never considered myself a runner. It was more of like a just, you know, I feel like I need some cardio, and I kind of want to just get moving, but not too long type of a thing. Now with this first week of getting into running seriously, trying to hybrid athlete training, I wanted to hit it hard. So I set myself a goal of running 25 miles this first week, and miraculously I actually was able to accomplish this. However, coming from basically not running to running 25 miles in one week was quite tasking on my body. Now I did end up losing about two pounds, some measurable circumference in the arms and legs, but in my opinion my physique after this first week doesn't look too much different compared to the before. But this is only one week. I wanted to continue my running journey from here. So because I believe 25 miles my first week of running was a little bit overkill, I decided to jump into the second week, cutting that a little bit over half. Setting myself a goal of running 10 miles this second week, and then working my mileage up week after week from here on out. However, I noticed a few negative things starting to happen. First of all, I believe coming off of those 25 miles, my body wasn't fully recovered and trying to jump into 10 miles the second week was still overzealous. You see, during the second week, I was only able to run two miles at a time for the first two days before my body just felt like it quit on me. And on day four of the second week, I set out to run a total of four miles. However, right after the first mile, I started to notice my Achilles aching pretty badly. Stopping to try to stretch it out and hopefully continue on. Well, for the second mile, it only started to get worse. So I decided to call this run at only two miles. My Achilles was then aching the entire next day. I decided to take it off from running and try some ice bucket therapy to help with circulation and hopefully recovery. But I only had one more day left in the week to hit my goal of 10 miles. And not wanting to quit, I pushed myself to run four miles after training arms. Now, fortunately, the pain in my Achilles did not get worse. In fact, warming up into this run, it kind of went away. Was my body beginning to adapt to this new volume of running or was I slowly chipping away at my body and my gains? Four miles was that overkill. Hopefully when I cool down, I still feel good. But yeah, I feel like that was challenging. Longest I've ran so far this week for a total of 10 miles. Is that something I should shoot for every week now? I'm going to try to do that. And if I can go up, maybe do that. But yeah, starting off the second week, 10 total miles. I'm going to take tomorrow as a complete rest day. I think I need it. And that's all I got to say. I'm going to go refuel. Now, on the first workout of week three, wanting to maintain my vertical jump height gains I've made from previous experiments, I started my workout after a warmup with some plyometrics and then some barefoot sprints. Now, this might seem sketchy and kind of like a bad idea considering my Achilles issues from week two. However, when doing these explosive movements, I did not notice any irritation at all. However, after running sprints, when I started to run some distance, after about a mile in, I started to notice some Achilles irritation once again. So what was going on here? Why were the explosive movements not causing me any issues? But then when I would run a long distance, all of a sudden I start to develop this Achilles pain. Well, I thought it might have something to do with my gait. That is my leg and feet pattern with each step. So analyzing my running, comparing sprinting to long distance, I noticed something very peculiar. When running long distance over like a half a mile or so, it appeared like my ankle started to relax. Relax a little too much. With every step during a distance run, my foot and ankle began to land more and more over pronated. That is landing way too far on the inside of the foot. And I believed running like this for thousands of steps during these distance runs was causing my Achilles irritation due to this non-uniform position of the tendon through the foot, ankle, and lower leg. You see, whenever I did sprints or plyometrics, my leg and foot were more in a neutral rigid position and my tendon was more aligned. So going through week three, I really worked on keeping my foot and ankle in a runs, which was actually very difficult to do at first. But thankfully as the week went on, I adjusted to this and thankfully again, it turns out I must've been right one way or the other because week four, my Achilles pain had pretty much vanished. And by the end of week four, I was able to run longer runs with no pain and get my total weekly mileage back up over 10 for 11 miles. However, something else wasn't right. Overall, my body and my day-to-day energy seemed to be on a downturn. I was feeling very fatigued all the time, constantly sore and just run down. You see, I wasn't only trying to increase my running volume, but I was also doing weight training and other physical experiments as well. I think I started to overload myself and essentially overflow my bucket of physical stress. And by the end of week five, I felt overall like I was beginning to regress, not just in running, but in everything else I was doing physically. I just felt and looked tired. So it was at this point, I came up with the idea of taking an entire week off. Now I made a video on this and it actually turned into 10 days off because some interesting things happened. Watch that video if you haven't already. But thankfully by the end of 10 days of doing minimal physical strain, I felt refreshed. However, when I did get back into training, I wanted to change up my approach, not only for an experiment, but also because I was curious to see if I could achieve a different type of result. That type of training I called type 2x training, simply focusing on only short, quick, and explosive movements for exercise. Now it was throughout this next couple of weeks of this type 2x training where I shifted my running style from long distance running to focusing on short, quick, explosive sprints. Now this is where I noticed something very interesting. You see, on my first workout back after these 10 days off, when I went to go warm up for these very quick explosive sprints in this type 2x training, well, I ended up running a half a mile just to get loose. And during that half a mile, I was so out of breath. I felt so out of shape. Breathing and panting so hard, it was grueling. And I'm thinking like, what the heck? Only a half a mile? Before this, I was running a minimum of two miles at a time with ease. This was very interesting to me, just how fast my cardiovascular endurance gains were lost by taking 10 days off. However, on the contrary, my quick explosive speed felt way up. In fact, I felt like I ran some of the fastest sprints and had some of my quickest movements in the longest time after taking these 10 days off. Now throughout the next couple of weeks, I worked on my sprints and explosive movements, and I felt like I even made more improvements in that department. Now at the end of this period of this type 2x training, I felt very solid and wholesome. Like my body felt connected, more so than I've felt in a while. And now this might sound like a bit of an abstract explanation, but after going through these two months or so with these two types of different styles of running, first distance running and then only focusing on short, quick sprints, well, I noticed that when I was doing more distance running, my body was beginning to feel not as solid. It's not like my weight really changed or I lost that much muscle one way or the other, but it's almost like I had this diminishing ability to feel like my entire body was connected. Maybe this was an exhaustion thing. Maybe this was my muscles maybe becoming weaker from so much running. Maybe it was from central nervous system fatigue. But what I'm saying is that after this phase of doing only quick, intense training, it felt like I got back this full body connectivity and then some. And in realizing I lost this, but then gained it back, well, it was not something I wanted to lose again. However, I did want to get back into more distance running because on the contrary to this, a little something I noticed while only focusing on quick, short burst movements, well, I just didn't feel that post-running endorphin rush, that release, that like almost happiness, that rewarding feeling that comes with running some distance. Now I know there's an argument for that saying it's just a primitive response, your body rewarding you because you ran away from something dangerous or something like that, and it has nothing to do with health. But regardless, it still feels good. And in this day and age, that feeling good is motivation to do it again. So I tried to come up with a way to hybridize these two types of running into my training regimen. And while it wasn't perfect each week, but it kind of went like this. Running distance, but only two miles on my upper body days. And I typically did this after an upper body lift and then running sprints along with doing plyometrics, that's quick explosive jumping on my lower body days. And I would actually do this after my weight training sessions as well. So yes, I know my weight training sessions could have taken away some of my energy for these runs. And yes, some of the runs could also contradict some of the weight training sessions overall for the progress. But remember from the very beginning of this, I acknowledged that I was going to get into a hybrid athlete training, not just solely being a runner, but also doing weight training as well. But now with these two types of running into this training, it's like I'm a hybrid, hybrid athlete, I'm a hybrid athlete. So having two upper body and two lower body days a week throughout the end of month three, I was only running four miles a week plus the sprints. But for me, this was actually the perfect balance of everything. I felt like I quickly made my cardiovascular gains back, I felt like I didn't lose much speed and quickness, I didn't lose that full body connectivity. And in the gym, I actually noticed myself getting stronger, while outside of the gym, I noticed myself getting leaner. Also, for me, two miles was the perfect distance to still have that adventurous feeling when I was running. Coupled with this, I also tried to run in new places, trying to see new things, navigate through new terrain. And as a result, these last couple of weeks were perhaps the most fun I've had running this entire journey. Finally feeling like I had the correct ratios of everything in order for me to continue to make progress, I continued with this regimen for the next couple of weeks. And after three months of this trial and error diving into running, I was curious to see if there were any noticeable changes to my physique. Let's take a look. So down a little over nine pounds since I started this journey. In my opinion, I do look leaner, but it does look like my overall size has decreased. However, it still does look like I'm retaining some important muscle groups in my opinion. Also, in my opinion, looking at the lower body, I feel like my legs look better, especially from the reverse view. Now for the next two weeks after this, I actually continued to get leaner, peaking down around 185-ish pounds. But then if you haven't seen the video, I kind of reversed the tides into Thanksgiving, kicking off a light bulking phase. I'm made for this. However, throughout all of this, I continued my running regimen. And with this whole journey in mind, I was determined to keep running a staple to my exercise routine. How cool is this? Sitting on this piece of cement, washed up ashore here, checking out the frozen lake. Don't worry, I'm not gonna go step on that. I am not a dimwit. Yeah, I'd never make it to this spot if I didn't run here, you know what I mean? So running, the big adventure. That's probably the best thing about running in my opinion is that adventure combined with that endorphin rush. Oh, look at the sun. But I'm telling you, two miles is the sweet spot. And honestly, for me, it's like one mile out and then one mile back, all right? Rest in between, you know, taking a sight. I mean, what's it worth if you're just gonna run through something in pain and not even enjoy it? I guess unless you're training for a race, but I'm not. So this is it for now. Maybe I'll increase the mileage from here as I adapt more to it. But it just seems like I found the sweet spot. Two miles twice a week, plus some sprint if I can. Let me know what you guys think about running and I hope you guys all enjoyed this video. Thanks for coming along to run with me. And yeah, it's been quite a journey, over 100 days of running. So I have more stuff coming in the future, more challenges. Stay tuned. Thank you all so much for watching. Hope you all have a great day. Peace. I will see you all in the next video.