Miles and miles and miles – Gosport runner celebrates 1,000 successive days of running

As a result, he clocked up the superb milestone of 1,000 consecutive days of running on Sunday - coincidentally, the day he celebrated his 46th birthday – in his weekly fun run with Absolute 545 Running Club colleagues .

To mark the achievement, Miles’ partner Gillian Horn had arranged a surprise – there to greet him at the end, at Stokes Bay, was an inflatable finishing tunnel. His mum Libby was also present to witness her son’s achievement.

Miles is an incredibly apt christian name - since he dedicated himself to putting on his trainers on a daily basis, he has clocked up (as of last Thursday morning) 4,662 of them.

His running odyssey began when the 2020 Great South Run fell victim to the pandemic. Unable to pound the streets around Southsea, he signed up for an online GSR solo challenge instead.

‘You could run for 24 days in a 48-day period,’ he recalled. ‘I decided to run every single day in September (2020).

‘Before that, my running had been off and on, I needed a bit of a kick to get back into it.

‘I ended up running every day in the September, so I thought I might as well do all 48 days. It just snowballed from there. I thought I might as well do 100, and so on - it’s just become a thing.

‘I set myself a challenge in 2021 to run 2,021 miles, but secretly I was hoping for more. I ended up averaging 10k (6.23 miles) a day - in 2021 I ran 2,275 miles.’

Miles, a Portsmouth-born design engineer who lives in Gosport, is a member of a global online running group, Streak Runners International. To have your streak recognised, you have to run at least a mile a day. Miles aims for a ‘minimum’ of two miles a day.

Having now completed his 1,000th successive day of running - Sunday was his ‘comma’ day in streak running terms - you might be forgiven for thinking Miles is high up the Streak Runners International list. After all, almost three years of running every day is fairly impressive.

Sadly, he isn’t. In fact, he is number - wait for it… - 3,330.

Top of the charts is Jon Sutherland, with a barely believable streak of 19,724 days. The 72-year-old American, who lives in Washington, started his streak in May 1969 - 54 years ago! That’s dedication for you.

Completing the top four are three more Americans - Jim Peters (19,458 days), Steve DeBoe (18,982 days) and Alex Galbraith (18, 784 days).

Talk about putting Miles’ achievements in the shade!

There are 180 runners in the UK alone with a longer streak than Miles, who under ‘occupation’ on the Streaks International website has written ‘crocodile wrestler’. That list is headed by Jim Taylor, who lives in Stirling, with a streak of 11,105 days – having started in early 1993.

Asked how long he will carry on, Miles remarked: ‘I don’t know. I might wake up one day and decide I don’t enjoy it enough. I haven’t reached that day yet.

‘You get ups and downs, some days I’m like a teenager, not wanting to go out!

‘There’s one target in particular I would like to reach - I use an app called Smash Run and it tells me that I went 1,469 days without running (from some time in 2012 onwards).

‘I would like to run for as many days in a row as I didn’t run for.

‘Some days aren’t enjoyable, but running helps my mental health massively. It’s just a way to escape, no one to bother you - just one foot in front of the other.’

Miles also has his ‘Forrest Gump Day’ coming up later in the year. In the film, Forrest ran for three years, two months, 14 days, and 16 hours. So having started on September 1 2020, Miles will equal Forrest’s stat on November 22 - and plans to wear Forrest Gump fancy dress to celebrate.

In order to reach his ‘comma’ day, Miles had to run for a few weeks at one point nursing what could have been a fractured ankle.

That was an injury suffered after he had stepped off a kerb to help someone whose bike was broken.

‘It might have been fractured, I don’t know, but it did swell up a lot,’ he recalled. ‘I just strapped it up and carried on - I don’t recommend it.

‘I only did two miles that day (of the injury) - I was aiming for a lot more.’

As well as his streak, Miles has another running ambition - to clock up 50 marathons by the time he is 50. At present, he is on 14.

He also wants to take part in more longer distance races than just the 26 miles and 385 yards marathon course.

With that in mind, the recent 47-mile jaunt around Lake Windermere in the Lake District - a race known as simply ‘The Lap’ - was a portal into his running future.

‘It was horrible,’ he remembered. ‘There was 2,700m of elevation (Mt Snowdon, for comparison purposes, is 1.085m high). The last 17 miles was a real mental and physical challenge.

‘I said after that I wouldn’t do another one, but a few days later I was looking around for other races…

‘I’d like to run around the Isle of Wight, and I’d like to do a 100-mile race at some point.

‘I find running very soothing for the soul.

‘I hear some people saying they can’t run, but anyone can run.

‘People are way more capable of doing things than they give themselves credit for.’