Eleven years ago, Marco Consani, an ultrarunner from Glasgow, decided to run 5km or at least 25 minutes every day in November. His wife Debbie, also a running enthusiast, decided: “If you´re going to do this then I´m going to do it also, but I´m going to do it in December when it´s harder.” So she followed suit in what she called the first “Marcothon”. Since then and with the help of social media it has been growing more popular across the globe and there are local Marcothon Facebook groups, also in Austria. I have done this challenge for the first time in 2019 and, although cycling has become my primary sport this year, I joined the challenge again in December 2020.
Scheduling the runs and squeezing them in your daily routine is often harder than doing the run itself. Just running very slowly for 25 minutes on those days where you wouldn´t have a regular run scheduled in your training or substituting half an hour of your bike training by a slow run is less challenging on physical aspect than on mental aspect. Heading out at 5 a.m. in the morning at freezing rain or at 9 p.m. at night when the rest of the family is making themselves comfortable on the couch with some Christmas cookies.
Although there were days where I wanted to quit and had to be convinced by other members of the Vienna Marcothon group on FB to go on, I managed to keep up and finish this year’s Marcothon. When my timeline in Strava on December 31st was full of proud finisher reports of the Festive 500 (congrats to all of you!), which is unreachable for me, I was still happy and proud of looking back on my 31-day-running-streak with a total of 180km running-km in December.
More information about the story behind “Marcothon”