The Progress Pod - Ep 7 - Charity Challenge 4x4x48

The speaker discusses their upcoming charity challenge, the David Goggins 4x4x48 challenge, with a twist. Instead of running four miles every four hours for 48 hours, they will run 4.4 miles every four hours for 48 hours. The challenge is to raise money for the charity Tiny Tickers, which helps identify heart defects in children. The speaker shares their training plan and preparations for the challenge, including their diet and recovery routines. They express excitement, nerves, and curiosity about how they will handle the mental and physical demands of the challenge. They invite others to join them for the runs and provide details of the starting locations. They also mention their intention to provide a recap of the challenge in a future episode. Hello and welcome to episode number seven of the progress pod. So still not going around to getting any sort of fancy intro music and stuff like that added, but we'll get there at some point. But today's episode, I'm going to be chatting through the charity challenge that I am just about to embark on. So at the time of recording, I am less than 48 hours away. When I release this, it will be the day before it. So in terms of what I'm doing, if you've not seen my socials at all or are unsure, I'm taking on the David Goggins 4x4x48 challenge with a wee bit of a twist. So if you've not heard of the Goggins challenge, it's essentially running four miles every four hours for 48 hours. So by the end of the 48 hours or the two days, you've run 48 miles. But 48 miles is only four miles short of two marathons. So I was keen to adjust it slightly and go for 4.4 miles or seven kilometres every four hours for 48 hours, which means over the two days, I'll have ran two marathons. But the main thing here to realise is it's all broken up. So there's minimal time for sleep, minimal time for recovery in between. So it's a really intriguing challenge to me. If you don't know, I would probably class myself as a runner in terms of I run regularly. I've run in all sorts of running events. I've hit PBs at relatively decent paces. So the running itself for me, if you were just saying, I'll just go and go out running, probably isn't the big challenge. But I've never done any ultramarathons or anything further than a marathon, really. So this over these two days, running, what's that, roughly 84k, something like 84, 85k in the two days, but all broken up with minimal sleep is going to be a completely new challenge to me. I'm really intrigued to see how I handle it. I've got a lot of things to kind of juggle. I'll get into this in terms of how I'm feeling for it, but really, why am I doing this? So the first thing is to raise money for a charity called Tiny Tickers. So Tiny Tickers are a charity that do a lot of work in helping sort of hospital staff and doctors and put a lot of money into researching and finding ways to identify heart defects in children earlier on. So my oldest daughter, Rosie, when she was born, she was born with a heart defect, but it wasn't picked up until she was five months old. Thankfully, she had an operation, everything was all sorted out and she's thriving now, which is great, but there's some children that aren't so lucky. And what Tiny Tickers do is to try and identify these defects at an earlier stage so that more lives can be saved. And that's a family, sorry, a charity close to my family's heart. So they're a small charity. I'm keen to raise money for them. So that's the real reason behind the challenge. Also, the Progress Project and myself as a whole haven't done any sort of charity events since we've started just over the last year, so I really wanted to get involved in a charity challenge. So that's the main thing, and also just a challenge to myself to see how I handle this, as I've never really done anything like it, and it really is an intriguing challenge. I know I'm doing slightly more than the 4x4x48, but it really is the same thing, and I know a lot of people have done it in the past, and having spoken to a few people, they have said it's quite a brutal challenge, so quite intrigued to see how I handle it. So yeah, how am I feeling for it? Feeling good, quite excited for it, getting quite nervous as the time comes close. I've been planning it out, like my day, what I'm going to try and eat, when I'm going to try and sleep, what I'm going to try and do in between runs, and actually planning it out has actually made it a wee bit more daunting in the sense of how many runs I need to do in that short space of time. But I am feeling it's a hard one, because when you train for a marathon or a half marathon or an event, you kind of follow a strict training plan, you know what you're doing, you can go into it saying, I'm feeling prepared for this, I'm feeling ready for this, whereas this is completely different, in terms of training for this, I've not really changed my training much. I go out runs regularly, I've still been weight training, I exercise probably six out of seven days a week at least, so I've just been doing my normal training in the hope that I've got the fitness, I've got the strength in the legs to get through it, especially when you've got a few hours break in between. So it's a hard one to know and see how you're feeling for it, because I just don't know, it's a complete unknown for me, it's like nothing I've ever done before, and it's just like that, I just don't know if I'm ready for it or not, because it's not like a marathon or whatever where you've got that specific training plan that you can stick to and then try, and you're going in feeling prepared, and potentially going in under prepared, because I just don't know. So I'm just hoping that the fitness I've got can get me through it. I think for me, the hardest thing, as I said, will likely be just how I handle it mentally with the lack of sleep and recovery, like I'll be coming home in between runs with the kids being there, like a busy house, I'm not going to be able to sleep in between the runs during the day anyway, so I'll be lucky to get a sleep in between the night time runs, maybe 90 minutes at a time, so I reckon over the two days I'll be lucky to get six hours broken sleep, if I'm lucky I think, so that's going to be really hard for me, and like the tough thing for me I think, especially my body clock really, I wake up pretty early, go to bed quite early, like the midnight run on both the days is going to be brutal for me, that's when I'm typically in my deepest sleep, I've normally been in bed by like half nine latest, midnight is when I'm like zonked, anything kind of after three o'clock in the morning, I'm actually starting to get towards that waking up stage, so I'm not too worried, this midnight one, the two midnight ones, especially that second midnight one, which is going to be I think run number 10, that's going to be where I'm going to be tested to the limits in terms of mentally being able to get myself up after nine runs already, like absolutely shattered, that's when it's going to be, that's where I'm going to find the challenge the most I feel, in terms of mentally with the fatigue, tiredness, rather than the actual specific running, I think having that, I think it would actually be easier, I've never done this, I've never ran two marathons in two days, but I actually think I would be finding it easier if I was just to run a marathon at a steady pace on say Thursday, and then run another marathon at a steady pace on Friday, like just having that 24 hours gap between the two races, good sleep, good fuel, recovery, like I think I would find that easier than this, every four hours getting a run done, because 7k, or 4.4 miles, it's not like, it is quite a fair distance, I'll probably be running for about 40 minutes every time, it's not just like a 2k run that's going to be done in 10 minutes, so it's a fair distance, so yeah, I'm feeling excited for it, a bit nervous, but mainly intrigued as well, just to see how I react to it, how I handle it, and yeah, it's going to be my toughest challenge to date, sometimes when I've been watching other challenges, like the hardest geyser running the length of Africa, and there's another guy at the moment doing like a 102 Ironman in 102 days, like you see these crazy challenges, it kind of peels this one into insignificance, but for me, this will be the toughest challenge that I've ever faced to date, so yeah, I'm looking forward to it in that sense, looking forward to seeing how I'm going to handle it, but yeah, just wanted to give a wee insight into how I've prepared for it, what my plan is, in terms of my plan, yeah, I've got a touch on that, it's really just a case of eating, getting the run done, coming back, quick stretch, quick foam roll, getting the ice bath a few times in between the runs, making sure I'm eating, I'm going to be eating a lot, pretty much after every single run, so if it's midnight, four in the morning, I'll be eating, and my food is going to be fairly simple, it's going to be a lot of chicken and rice, a lot of oats, usually, bottles of Le Cuisine, a lot of carb-heavy sauces, I'll probably have a few protein shakes in there, but it's going to be things that are quick and easy to make, I'm not going to be coming home and trying to make a dinner, I'm literally going to have the microwave packets of rice, packets of the cooked chicken already, and that's just going to be my meal, it's going to be, the less time I can spend doing things in the house, it's going to be preventing the recovery, the better, so my plan really is, every run, come back, quick kind of cool down, stretch, roll, ice bath every so often, not after every run, but an ice bath, maybe two or three throughout the journey, get some food on board, and then if it's during the night time, the night time ones, I'll try and get to bed for a couple of hours before getting up for the next one, during the day, it's probably just going to be normal life, to be honest, I'll be dealing with the kids, maybe missing members, doing a wee tiny bit of work here and there, if I can, if I've got the mental capacity, so yeah, it's going to be normal life, which is going to make it harder as well, it's not as if I'm just going back to a cave or something with nothing happening that can just lie there, in between runs, it's going to be normal life, this is me just in the middle of normal days, and then I'll try and get a few hours of sleep in between the night time ones, so that's my plan for it, plenty of fuel, recover as much as possible, and yeah, we'll just see how it goes, but yeah, I'm excited to get into it, and if you are keen on joining me for one of the runs, or two of the runs, or however many runs you want, feel free, the more the merrier, I've already had a good few of you guys, the listeners, members, just random people on Instagram messaging me, and they're going to come and join me in a run, so all the runs, the first 11 runs, sorry, we'll be leaving from the Aldi in East Kilbride, and the one, if you know East Kilbride, it's the one, I think it's Maver Avenue it's called, it's the one at the D&Q Kingsgate area, and so I'm just going to pick that Aldi there, 11 of them are going to start from there, I've picked two routes, so one, just going to alternate the routes, so the first one, run one will be the first route, run two will be the second route, and run three back to the first route, and just do it like that, just to mix it up a wee bit, and then the final run will be at Runcub on Saturday, 8am, so Saturday the 15th of July, 8am, at Sprout in East Kilbride, as well, we'll be kicking off the final 4.4 mile run, or 7k run, if you are keen on joining me, and you haven't already messaged me, message me, let me know, because I want to make a note of everybody who's planning to come to each run, because if I come run 5 or 6, mentally I'm going to be shattered, so I'm not going to remember everybody who said they were going to come to the run or not, so if you let me know, as soon as possible, I'll get names written down, I've actually got all my plans, I won't buy you a lot of what I'm going to be doing, just so I don't even need to think during this challenge, I just need to come in, scratch, score everything off as I'm doing it, and just work my way down it, but yeah, excited to get it done, and if you do want to donate, I'll put the link in the show notes here, and also the links in my Instagram bio, and also just drop me a message if you want to donate, I can send you that link over, and yeah, looking forward to hopefully running with a few of you guys, and yeah, I'm going to come back on next week with a bit of a recap of how it went, but just wanted to give a wee bit of an insight as to what my plans are, how I've been training for it, how I'm feeling for it, what I'm actually doing, why I'm doing it, and yeah, just a wee bit of an update, I'm going to be kind of pushing it this week, as you've probably seen in my stories and things like that, been chatting about it a lot, so yeah, looking forward to it, and we'll see how it goes, I'll speak to you next week, hopefully having completed the challenge, speak to you soon.