This April, my friend Jordan Utley challenged a group of people to run a 5k every day for 30 days. Once I made it through 30 days I decided to keep going and pushed my goal to 100 days! I’m thrilled to share that I successfully ran for 102 consecutive days of at least 5k every single day for a complete total of 362 miles in 102 days! I began my first day on April 12th, and reached day 100 on July 20th.

But what’s running without some data to back it up?

📊 To give my challenge a data-driven approach, I wrote some Google Apps Script to automatically pull my running statistics from Strava to a google sheet and pumped it into Looker Studio. The result? A real-time dashboard that tracked distance, pace, and even weather conditions. I set this dashboard up to retrospectively break out my 102 day challenge and highlight my all time / 2023 totals.

What I learned

• Consistency is key: Making something a daily habit is empowering.
• Your own data can be a powerful motivator, this will help me the rest of the year as I pivot more to swimming and biking.
• Scripting can make the mundane magical: automating the data collection makes the process seamless and lets me focus on improving my activities.
• You are stronger than you know, there were many days were I was in pain and felt like I had to quit, but I kept pushing myself to accomplish something that originally seemed impossible.

Not only did I improve my average speed and distance, I dropped 20 lbs and set myself up for a successful rest of the year.

Check out the dashboard here