Next up: A 90 mile run/walk

To celebrate the first anniversary of making my goal weight, my sister and I ran 90 miles in nine days, which was as grueling in terms of scheduling as it was on our legs.

Finishing up at the clock tower in Berne, Ind.

Last year we rode 90 miles in just over nine hours, which was quite the adventure as neither one of us had rode much more than 20 miles before.

This year the idea is to complete 90 miles on foot, ideally in 24 hours. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. We‘ll be walking much more than running, and if we can average 4 miles every hour — a 15-minute per mile pace — we‘d log  80 miles in 20 hours, leaving us 4 hours for the last 10.

Not surprisingly, we’ve spent much more time fretting over how we’re going to fit this into our schedule than how we’re going to actually do it. It’s not like we’ve done any specialized training, other than our usual fitness and racing regimens. But it seems at least theoretically possible, so we’ll figure it out as we go.

Right now, it looks like we’d start on Wednesday, Oct. 23 after the kids get on the bus and finish sometime the following morning. Though we live in different school districts, both have Oct. 24 off for a fall break, so the kids could tag along with us part of the way Wednesday evening and then have a sleepover at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

Running in the rain during our first 90in9 challenge.

Naturally, new complications have arose since we hammered out this plan. It looks like at least some of my kids’ parent-teacher conferences would occur during those two days, so we’d have to make sure we finished on time, or close to it.

As for the charity I’ll support this year, that’s currently up in the air. In the past it’s been the American Cancer Society, but lately I’ve been thinking that supporting the expansion of an area trails network would be cool. Not only would that be a good fit with my interest in fitness and sustainable transportation, but it would also support cancer prevention in a backhanded kind of way, since exercise is a great weapon in the fight against cancer.