Virtual community Run The Edge offering a new challenge for 2016

With New Year’s Day approaching, many runners are making resolutions for 2016 in the form of training, racing, and personal milestones.

Enter Run The Edge, an all-encompassing motivational training system dedicated to helping all runners and walkers succeed by overcoming their own personal challenges. Run The Edge offers runners an avenue to be part of an online running community where members track miles, chat on forums, and gain inspiration from others.

For the second consecutive year, Run The Edge is rolling out its ‘Run the Year‘ initiative, a fitness challenge for the new year where runners aim to cover 2,016 miles (3,245 kilometres) in 2016. More than 25,000 runners took part in last year’s resolution, running 2,015 miles in 2015.

“We want to give something that runners can talk about, something positive and challenging,” added Tim Catalano, co-author of Running the Edge along with U.S. Olympian Adam Goucher, from Boulder, Colo.

The 2015 initiative, led by Goucher and Catalano, was introduced on Dec. 26, 2014 with 20,000 runners entering the challenge in the first week alone, according to Catalano. The upcoming campaign will begin on Jan. 1, 2016.

Runners have the option to do it alone (‘solo’), on a team of two (‘dynamic duo’), or a team of three (‘triple threat’), depending on level of experience and desired mileage for 2016. The platform offers a mileage tracker where runners manually input their training.

RELATED: What’s to come in 2016.

The solo challenge averages out to approximately 5.5 miles per day, or 8.85 kilometres. Miles were used instead of kilometres because it provides a greater challenge for runners, according to Catalano in reference to Canadian users (and others who use the metric system).

New for 2016 is the online expo, which resembles a race expo, an environment familiar to many runners. The resource provides training plans and tips, nutrition advice, and more, including feedback from elite-level runners.

“In 2015, we were heavily dependent on the social media aspect of Run The Edge and with that we received a lot of similar questions throughout the course of the year,” added Catalano. “For 2016, we added a forum where runners can ask questions and get answers from the running community.”

Run The Edge is also offering a giveaway each day in 2016, with a total of 366 (it’s a leap year) prizes expected to be handed out to runners through the online platform. The first quarter will feature prizes from Oiselle, Soleus and Dirty Girl Mud Run.

According to Catalano, 530 Canadians participated in ‘Run the Year’ in 2015, second to only the United States. There are still more than 18,000 active users on the platform, providing a tight-knit community among runners from around the world.

More information on Run The Edge can be found here.