In September, I began a running challenge with my friend, Swagger Gus. His girlfriend, The Soul Crusher, also joined in. On October 18th, we finished the four-week-long competition. My goal was to run farther than Gus. Using a private club on the Strava running app we measured total distance, time, and elevation.
Results
| Distance | Time | Elevation | |
| Akshay Rao | 65.6 km | 7:36:58 | 386 m |
| Swagger Gus | 53.4 km | 8:02:00 | 381 m |
| The Soul Crusher | 109.1 km | 14:12:04 | 482 m |
As shown above, The Soul Crusher crushed my soul by running farther, longer, and higher than me. I was super bummed out. If we ignore my crushed soul for a minute and compare my performance with Swagger, then I ran farther but he ran longer. I barely climbed higher than he did.
I learned soon after the challenge ended that my boy Swagger bet his girlfriend that she couldn’t run twice as much as he did. On October 18th, he learned that he was wrong. Two souls were crushed that day.
Reflection
I didn’t expect much from my boy, Gus, so I’m impressed that he did so well. He was a runner already but a lot of people say they run. Now that I’ve seen the results I can say he’s a runner.
Like I wrote already, The Soul Crusher crushed my soul. I wanted to run farther than her so bad in the first two weeks. By week three I learned that once your soul is crushed you gotta take time to put it back together. Sadly, I never did.
As for me, this was super tough. In the first two weeks I ran about 25 km each. Before the challenge I would average around 15 km per week. These two weeks were so tough because many times I ran 3 or 4 days in a row. Already nursing an old calf injury, I pushed my body pretty far. In week four, I decided to take it easy. My legs hurt each day for the rest of the week. I’m glad I did this because now I suspect that I would have injured myself if I had continued.
Akshay Rao 