COLUMN: The girl who ran 2,016 miles in 2016

One month into 2017, and junior Emily Lee hasn’t even officially started her New Year’s resolution. But she’s not too worried. If there’s one thing she learned from last year, it’s that things rarely ever stay on track, especially when she set out to run 2016 miles in 2016.

That’s an average of 5 and a half miles per day. Lee read about the goal online, and immediately thought it was daunting, even for a pretty experienced runner like herself.

“That’s a big misconception about runners, especially long distance,” Lee said. “Unless you’re at a very high level, people don’t do these crazy long distances.”

However, after conquering her first two marathons in 2015, she was ready for the next challenge. Lee joined a Facebook group of thousands of other people around the world pursuing the same goal, and started tracking her miles.

That online community was a great source of support for her. Eventually, Lee started posting updates about her runs on her Facebook account and rating each run based on how she felt. Lee was an RA last year, and the idea to rate her runs actually came from her residents following the endeavor. She decided to use these Facebook posts as a way to raise awareness for women and survivors of gender-based violence. Each running update had a link to a GoFundMe campaign, which Lee created to raise money for the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention and Services (RSVP) office in Engemann at USC.

The thing that stands out about her online track record of a year’s worth of runs is that there’s a lot of variation. As Lee points out, most serious runners have training cycles, not an exhaustive, constant slog. She’s also a big fan of rest days, so Lee doesn’t even run seven days a week. On slower weeks, she’ll run just two or three miles a day and do a longer run on the weekends. Even after months of building up mileage, there were still plenty of runs that just didn’t feel good, and Lee embraced that.

“You can’t compare yourself to other people,” she said. “You have to be ok with a number of different of scenarios. When I was running [the Big Sur Marathon] in April, I was literally finishing my last day of antibiotics. I had bronchitis. I had to tell myself, ‘It’s OK if I walk. It’s OK if a lot of these older people pass me.’” Over the course of a year, Lee ran four marathons, and even the fourth one was no jog in the park. She was en route to a personal record marathon time when she was misdirected on the course. Her phone died, her fitness tracker died, and she didn’t get an official time that would qualify her for prestigious races like the Chicago or Boston marathons. It was a huge disappointment.

Still, Lee was well on her way to finishing 2016 miles even a day or two early. However, an ankle injury with just a few weeks left to go set her back.

“I had to take almost an entire week off, which meant that I would have to fit in 40, 50-plus miles into the last week, and I did it but it required a lot of planning because I had to do something morning and night and make sure I didn’t exacerbate my injury,” Lee said.

On Dec. 31, 2016, Lee finished her 2016th mile against all odds and raised over $400 for RSVP.

She says it was an astonishing feeling of accomplishment, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopping there. This year, Lee is going to do one mile better, and she’s looking forward to being more creative in her training runs.

“My favorite run is running from campus to the Disney Concert Hall, and doing a couple of the hills around there.”

Even with more than 2000 miles on her shoes, Lee still believes the short runs can go a long way.

Meghan Coyle is a senior majoring in print and digital journalism. She is also the online managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Chasing Pavements,” runs Tuesdays.