40 days later, I thought I would update with how the effort to run a 5K every day and get my time down is coming along. The short answer: it isn’t going as fast as it was before, but I’m the pace is still good; it’s still going quite well. I’ve been missing days here and there, for various reasons - mostly mental - but I’m still making progress. As of last time, I believe I was down to an 8:41 pace. I’m now at a 7:27 pace as of today. That’s a 23:11 5k. This is still nowhere near my personal best, but it’s definitely a nice serious drop. So it took 40 days to go down 1:14, that’s about 1.9 seconds/day. If I were to keep up this new pace I would get to 7:00 in about 15 days, and then 6:30 in about another 16 days, or roughly the end of January. I don’t know what my exact personal best is, but I know it’s above 6:00/mi, so if I got to that, I know I would have beat it. That would happen roughly around mid February - if I kept my current pace, but of course I won’t. I would anticipate being able to get there before my birthday in early April. My guess is Mid-March. One good thing: I’ve yet to fail once I start. That is, every time I got on the treadmill to run slightly faster, I did. The days you see with a flat line means I just missed that day. My sense is that I have another 0:30/mi to give without too much difficulty; it’s mostly a mental challenge to get on the treadmill. After that, I think the next 0:30/mi are going to be interesting. And then after that, it’s anybody’s guess. My guess is that my first “failure day” will happen somewhere in that 6:15-6:45 range. I’m committed to powering through the first failure or two, but I don’t want to turn this into a total grind or injure myself, so once I’m failing more than I’m succeeding, I’ll probably call it a day and back off. If I failed 2 days in a row or 3 days out of 5, I’d probably stop.

Somewhere in there, in order to keep making progress, I probably will have to alter other things: my sleep schedule, my diet, maybe even drop a few pounds. I’m willing to do some of that, although again, I don’t really want this to be a full frontal attack. The goal isn’t really to see what’s the best I could ever do; it’s more about being consistent and following through on a challenge.