Giving 75 Hard a Shot

In the beginning of the year I set out on a big fitness goal of completing an Olympic Triathlon. However, as I didn’t have a bike (nor a place to store it) and going to the pool was too much of a hassle, I settled for running. By May 24th, I ran my first ever half marathon and, upon seeing my progress over the course of a few months, decided that the next goal would be to run a full Marathon by the end of the year, which sounded perfectly attainable (I doubled my distance from 10k to 21k in about half a year, I just need to do it again 😅).

I am now in the motions of training for my marathon, but earlier this month I started to feel like it was all getting a bit… dull. I love the moments I run, but most of my training started to feel like groundhog day: wake up, go run, work for the rest of the day, try not to injure yourself, repeat. I felt like I needed a little boost. That’s when I thought about doing 75 Hard.

The Challenge

For those of you who don’t know, 75 Hard is a challenge that over the last few years became popular online and that boils down to doing 5 things every single day, for 75 Days straight:

  1. You have to train 2x a day, for at least 45 minutes, and one of them must be outside
  2. You have to follow a structured diet (the program does not specify one, but it has to be one that fits your goals). No cheat meals or alcohol are allowed
  3. You have to drink 1 gallon (about 3.78L) of plain water
  4. You have to read 10 pages of a non-fiction book
  5. You have to take a progress picture

If you fail any of these in any day, you must reset back to day 1.

How I’m Faring

Now, I must be honest and say that my personal standards for 75 Hard probably aren’t as rigid as they may seem, but they still fit the broader “goals” that the challenge prescribe. For example:

  • I don’t always have one of the trainings be outside, just because I feel like it makes 0 difference whether you train outside or indoors, as long as you train.
  • My diet, despite being structured, is very loose when it comes to cheat meals. This is mostly because that, since I’m training a lot and burning a lot of calories, I know that my weight won’t blow up if I have pizza for dinner, as long as I control my portions
  • I think limiting myself to non-fiction is moronic (and most non-fiction books aren’t that good to be honest), and I allow myself to read anything that interests me (will be starting A Game of Thrones today!)
  • I don’t always take the progress picture at the exact same time every morning, sometimes I take it at night (but I always take one!)

Based on this, “purists” of the challenge might consider I’m not doing 75 Hard at all, which is probably a fair assessment. But I’m still close enough to resemble it and to meet all the generic criteria of “training, eating clean, tracking your progress, and enriching your mind”. Above all, it certainly does feel like a challenge, and that’s good enough for me.

Since I started this, it brought the magical spark back into my training. I now feel a lot more joy in working out knowing that I get to cross out another completed day, and it has helped me tremendously at being more consistent with my eating (before, I didn’t have any excuse to refuse more food, so I would just end up eating it).

Signing Off

After doing this for 20 consecutive days, I feel like progress has been a lot more steady. I’m now aware that during my half-marathon training, especially with eating, I would be mostly taking small steps down during the week, only to climb them all back up on the weekends. Now, progress has been steady, and I’ve started feeling really good about it, both physically and mentally.

I hope to be able to keep this up for 2 more months, but so far I’ve been enjoying the ride. If you are curious on what the worst part of the challenge is, it most certainly is all the water. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are definitely not drinking enough of it. Until next time!

Sic Parvis Magna

— Motto of Sir Francis Drake