On January 1st our very own Jacklyn Giron will complete the 366 day running streak that she started last New Years. Since 2012 was a leap year that will make a total of 366 days she ran this year. This is crazy, mad running. To a keep a streak of this magnitude going you’ve got to make all sorts of compromises. A calendar year is littered with events that can trip up your perfect, pristine streak. Hurricanes, snowstorms, international flights, marathons, weddings, funerals. Whatever life throws at you, before the clock strike midnight, you’ve got to find a way to squeeze in a run.

You don’t run a streak because it’s a good training practice. Your body needs rest to rebuild itself. Running challenging runs back to back is a good way to get yourself hurt. If you want to train and run a streak, you’ll need to balance hard runs and recovery runs. And you’ll need to run smart by following your morning race days with easy late night runs.

So if streaks are brutally hard to maintain, and they are far from optimal training, why attempt one at all? The answers will naturally vary from person to person. I’ve attempted a half dozen streaks and been foiled each time before hitting my goal due to a new distraction — missed flights, late work nights, forgetfulness, beer.

I learned a couple of things from these streaks. The first is that discipline breeds discipline. The sense of accomplishment you get after finishing a run, makes you want to follow that up with more accomplishments. When I run everyday it puts me in the frame of mind I need to be in to get things done. The second thing I realized is that the daily ritual of being alone, active, and outside for at least some part of my day keeps me sane. Good coders are obsessive coders, but stringing days and nights and nights and days of coding together can turn even the most stable people into a bizarre caricature of themselves. A daily run seems to be an effective antidote.

So, without further ado, let me introduce the 5 new and slightly mad badges in ascending order of difficulty. These are all terribly difficult to achieve, so we made them black and gave them a broken border with the hope of creating a kind of terminator meets grandma’s yarn badass minimalism. Obviously that failed, but hopefully we’ve earned a little respect for the attempt.

You get this badge for running any 365 days. That’s a years worth of run days, but you can take however many years you want to accumulate them.

Run 365 days in 2 calendar years. Essentially you’ll need to average 1 run out of every 2 days for 2 years. Whew.

Earn this badge by running a solid 365 days in a row. You may start whenever you please, but you have to finish your streak at least 365 days later.

Get this one by running every single day for a calendar year. That means you’ve got to run every day from January 1st to December 31st.

Run 366 days in one calendar year. Unless your name is Steve Tant, Dedrick Welch, Pete Field, or Jacklyn Giron you’re going to have to wait 4 years to have a shot at this one. (yes this is very silly, but what can we say, so are we)

As always please don’t run if you feel you might be risking injury. No badge is worth a blown knee. Check out our tips for streaks and advice for scheduling runs on the Smashrun training blog. If you’re shooting for one of these badges and your legs aren’t up to it you can “run” however short you want. The spirit of these badges isn’t about being bull headed, it’s about dedication to the sport.

PS

Don’t worry. We know these badges are crazy. We’ll be adding new badges for normal non-insane people soon.

PPS

Garmin, GPX, TCX, HRM imports are getting really close to being ready for beta testing. Expect more updates in the coming weeks.

We know it’s been a long time coming. We’ve recently had to rework our entire data model to make way for future device and mobile app integration and, while it still requires a bit more work, we’re finally getting there… In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new features we just released!

33 New Badges

The Kelly series is our latest set of badges and we tried to include even more structure than usual for some of our progressive badges. For instance: the 12 monthly badges help you build consistency – run any distance for any 10 days in any given month. There’s also the staircase badges, which can help you with base training.

Keep in mind that some of the badges are quite challenging as well, like the Roadrunner and Mercury badges or the Towering Stairs. Train smart. And when in doubt – don’t go for it. There’s always more badges in the making!

Badge Details

Clicking on badges will now give you a better idea of how close you are towards earning it. That way, you can plan out your runs if you wanted to! Maybe you’d like to space out those 10 runs per month. Or plan out five 400-meter sprints followed by casual jogs at a pace slower than 10:00/mi (6:12/km) in the same month.

The details are basically there to help you make better decisions about your training schedule.

Notables

We’ve always said that Smashrun is about “making every run count.” We do this by focusing on the relative value of each and every run. PR’s are great, but they don’t happen everyday. So we’re introducing “notables.”

There’s often something exceptional about certain runs that we don’t always notice. The obvious is easy. You usually know when you’ve run your fastest of a certain distance, but what about the obscure? Like your fastest mile or km splits in a 3-month period, your lowest ever average HR, or your highest calories per minute burned in the past year. That’s what “notables” are for.

Share Monthly and Yearly Progress

Remember “Tweet your 2011 stats”? Now you can do it for every year and every month in your entire running history. We’ve also introduced Facebook aggregates as a temporary stand-in while we sort out the Facebook Open Graph API.

You have complete control over what’s published on Facebook and/or Twitter. We fill-in some of the stats for a given month or year, but you can always change it! Let’s say you’re training for the ING NYC Marathon and you’d like to keep your running buddies aware of your training progress. You could customize a monthly aggregate just by clicking on the edit icon on the top-right of your “publish to Facebook” window:

Prefer to tweet your progress? Same steps! Remember that the Facebook and Twitter icons will show up in all of your Overview pages. Just use the calendar on the right to navigate to the month or year you’d like to publish, click on your social network of choice, customize your post, and share.

Oh, and since we’re on the topic of Run Overviews – we made a tiny change that might make a world of difference when looking at your runs. Previously, the Overview pages would only allow you to view yearly and monthly aggregates, it didn’t link up directly with the By Run pages. Now, when you choose a specific month in a given year within your Overviews, you can also drill down to an exact date to see the individual run detail.

Here’s the “before”

And “after”…

Search for Friends

From the “Friends” drop-down on your Overview page, you can now search for Smashrun users by name and by Facebook association. If you’re friends with someone on Facebook that also uses Smashrun, you can find and follow them pretty quickly!

Revised Settings: Privacy, Profile Pictures, and Updating Your Birthday

At Smashrun, we take your privacy settings very seriously. Previously, you could only set your profile to private so that no one else could see your stats. In case you’d like to take extra measures, you can even tell Google not to index your pages and you’ll be completely “off the grid”.

We’ve also included a section for “email settings” so you can choose to only receive what’s most important to you.

And if you’ve been a Smashrunner all this time, but haven’t had a profile picture because you preferred not to use your Facebook account – we’ve finally fixed that dilemma… along with the birthday badge!

Need help figuring out how to access some of the new features? You can view this screencast of the new features as well.