Challenge Format:
20 consecutive days running two marathons each day

Date and Place:
May 25 – June 3, 2021 | Estonia

Goal: Run two marathons every day for 10 consecutive days, each under the magical 3-hour mark.

Course Details: All marathons were run near my home in Tartu on an 8.44 km loop, which I completed five times each day.

By clicking here, you can see the run map

Results: the first six marathons I ran under the magical 3 hours.

The 7th marathon marked the first time my completion time exceeded three hours. By the 5th day, it was evident that I wouldn’t be able to run sub-3-hour marathons in the second half of the challenge. As a result, after 10 marathons I decided to end the Challenge. Given that this challenge wasn’t my main goal for the season, I avoided the risk of overtraining or injury by merely completing the attempt. For me, it was still a major achievement as I managed to run two sub-3-hour marathons per day for three consecutive days for the first time.

Two key factors contributed to not achieving my goal.
First, the weather wasn’t on my side this time. The cold, windy, and rainy conditions during the second and third days made the challenge particularly tough. However, I don’t consider the weather to be the decisive factor, as I believe such conditions could have been overcome had I allowed equal recovery time between marathons. Ideally, I should have run the first marathon from 8 AM to 11 AM and the second from 7 PM to 10 PM.

Instead, to ensure enough sleep, I allowed 13 hours of recovery time at night and 5 hours during the day. This turned out to be a mistake. The issue arose because I couldn’t replenish the energy consumed during the first marathon within those few hours before the second marathon. As a result, I ran the second marathon of the day in an energy deficit, which accumulated over multiple days and became decisive in not achieving the goal.

Results by Day: