Beau Miles challenge

What is the Beau Miles challenge?

Resource by D. Jackson, remixed by A. Corney

The Introduction

Our everyday lives can often become overrun with school, work, trying to exercise, caring for our families, catching up with friends, so on, and so on. This doesn’t always leave us with time for ourselves, for our mental health and personal wellbeing, and to accomplish tasks that we want to achieve in our own lives.

Beau Miles - a self-described filmmaker, speaker, writer, oddball - had an idea to combat the above. He decided to run a mile every hour for 24 hours. In other words, he ran a marathon in a day! However, this was a different kind of marathon. After every mile, Beau tried to do as much as possible; making things, doing odd jobs, fixing stuff. It was all about running, doing, and thinking - making the most out of, and seeing the potential that a single day can offer!

We are going to be doing the same - organising a day around exercise to see what we can achieve and accomplish, even when in lock-down!

The Video

Make sure you watch Beau’s video before you read on! Get inspired. Get motivated. Get ready for the challenge!

Mile an hour challenge (Credit to Beau Miles)

The Challenge

You will be replicating Beau Miles’ ‘Mile an Hour’ challenge, but to a lesser extent. Here is what you will be doing:

• Basic (7km) Starting at 9am, you will run a mile (1.6 km) at the start of every hour through until 3pm (a total of 7 hours, and 11.2 kms). The mile could be a circuit of your street, a lap of your house, or running up and down the driveway 50 times to get to that 1000m.
• Advanced (21km): Start at 8am with 3km, then 2km every hour until 5pm.

Exercise Variation

• Some of you may have limited space at home, or you might want to limit yourself to only one outside exercise per day for your own safety during lockdown. If you want to, you can sub out the 1km run for 10 push, 10 sit ups, and 10 burpees at the start of every hour that you can do from home. Check with your parents first before you take off running throughout your neighbourhood!
• For the athletes out there, or those that really want to test themselves, you can run 2kms every hour (16km total), or do 20 push-ups, 20 sit-ups, and 20 burpees at the start of every hour.
• For the ultimate test, choose 5 hours of the day to add an additional 1km to. This will mean that you will run a half marathon (21kms) over the whole day!

Things to do before you start:

• You will need to measure out 1km before you start the challenge. Jump on Google Maps and map out a 1km circuit in your neighbourhood. Or you can measure the distance of your backyard/driveway and work out how many laps would work out to be 1km.
• After every km/set of push-ups, sit-ups, and burpees, take a quick selfie. This will document the exercise you get throughout the day. Post a photo below each milestone the day after. There is a log below for you to complete.

The List

Just like Beau did, in between each of your activities you will be completing a set of tasks and activities (making things, doing odd jobs, fixing stuff) after every 1km you run. You will find this list below.

Throughout the week, you will add things to your list that you want to achieve. There are also some compulsory items on your list that you must do! You can put anything on your list so long as it is productive - so not just 9 hours of gaming or watching Netflix!

The options are endless! It could be fun stuff: learning a song on your guitar, building something in your garage, teaching yourself a new skill, finishing that next chapter in your book. Or, it could be less fun stuff: doing some jobs around the house for your parents, finishing off some school work, helping your younger brother or sister with their school work.

For every item on your list that you complete, you need to either record a small video or take a picture to prove that you have done it. Post a link to the video or copy the picture after your day has finished.

The Reflection

Once you have finished your full-on day, sit down, and marvel at the day of work and exercise you have just completed. Once you have had a chance to contemplate your efforts, it’s time to reflect on what the point of all this was!

Here are some of Beau’s reflections from his 24-hour day.

Beau’s Reflections

• You can do a lot in 86,400 seconds. We get this slab of time, as the reading goes (as we all know) every day of our lives. Filling it with what might be called ‘tasks of purpose’, you subject yourself to feeling time as slow, fast, exciting, or cruel- based on the task at hand. Your body, which is in fact your brain (which is you), dips and spikes around a whole range of realities and energy.
• Being ‘present’ felt attainable when completing a lot of the tasks, especially the more tired I became. By the same token, with so much going on, being present also felt impossible; there was always somewhere to be, and something else to do. However…
• Running, as a circuit breaker each hour, was the perfect way to re-set how I felt, what I would do next, what I was doing (and feeling), and what I’d just done.
• I ran the 1-4am laps without a head-torch (or crew), drifting around the roads like a ghost. It was a spellbinding experience.
• Something can be said of a circadian rhythm being our master and controller. That is, sunlight giving the human body energy. Having run my whole life between dawn and dusk (with the odd late run, or early start), my body thought I was an idiot when running between the hours of midnight to 5am, try as I might to override the resistance with food, positive self-talk and swigs of home-made wine. I lay awake between uninspired laps wondering who ruled me– a bloody great star, or my own pea-brain? Loyal to the experiment I was happy to run through the dead of the night, but my legs and lungs had seemingly turned off the desire. Yet remarkably, this is where I gained the most powerful insight to what might be called embodiment; as the magpies crackled, my body came alive again, raised by the sun. Laps 20-23 were the easiest and energised, rolling out as if I’d started with a new set of legs….