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.