I wake to the haunting jingle of an alarm vibrating me out of the depths. The curtains are open but its dark – very dark. I can hear the wind whistling through the eaves and the rain lashing at the window in violent gusts. I should be hungover but the kilogram of stilton for three in the early hours must have soaked up the excess. Instead I just feel dazed, sluggish and fat. I know I need to get up, peel on the lycra and greet this weather head on, but for now I’ll snooze. Just 8 minutes I tell myself, already half submerged in the warm embrace of memory-foam. I check the weather apps, all of them, looking for a glimmer of hope, a weather window large enough to fit my plans. No luck. 

I eventually will my legs out of the bed. Alka-seltzer, a jug of coffee, porridge. As I swing into the saddle and fumble the gears with thick, clumsy gloves the clouds glow violet, hinting that somewhere behind their menace the sun has risen. I’m on the isle of Arran, Scotland, and plan to ride the 90k loop of its shores; keep the sea to my left or right? Headwind to start or finish? I’ll deal with it later I decide and set off with the false bravado of a rip roaring north-easterly. With no shops open, I’ll pay for that decision later but for now the caffeine has kicked in, the sea is shimmering and glinting, and the fresh coastal air has filled my lungs releasing a chain reaction of endorphins that ripple through my limbs. The dulsett tones of bagpipes ring in my ear from last night’s BBC Alba sessions and the peaty burn of a dram too many speckles my taste as I glug from a bidon. Fairly soon my face has frozen into the expression that will remain for the rest of the ride so I grin inwardly as I fight to stay balanced in the buffeting blasts rolling in from the Irish Sea. Its January the first. The challenge has started.

In its essence the Dry January Fitness Challenge (DJFC for those in the know) is a fitness and endurance competition that takes place between sun up on January the 1st to sun down on the 31st. Points are awarded proportional to time or distance depending on the sport and recorded in a google sheets doc that keeps a shared leader-board in flux as the days tick by. Extra points are awarded for PBs achieved and deducted if beverages consumed aren’t 0.0%. On top of this, previous winners also set extra challenges that can earn a hefty stock of bonus points. These challenges are often the most interesting and difficult, in previous years competitors have had to run a 5k in the first week that doubles to 10 in the second, 20 in the third and finishes with a 40km run on the final weekend. With the incentive of imaginary points, most signed up to this one-month ‘couch to marathon’ crash course and most had tendonitis come February. The power to cause such disruption to the lives of other competitors the year after winning is far greater motivation than seeing your name engraved on the hallowed trophy. This year there were three additional challenges; creating some ‘strava art’ that would be eventually judged by Danny’s mum, completing an ‘overnighter’ with minimum 4 hours activity either side of a camp, bivvy or bothy and completing a 28-day continuous streak of 8km runs, 30km rides or 2km swims.

The list of sports that count towards the challenge is as extensive as the debate about their point allocation that passionately rumbles and grinds along in what’s app groups and back channels throughout the month. As a rough example to the scoring, cycling is equivalent to one point a kilometre and running is 4, Yoga is 20 an hour and a HIT workout is 25. The conversation of whether running on sand should be allocated more points per kilometre than cross country skiing with a dog raged for days with the consistency of said sand and depth of snow all being key factors in the eventual formula that was voted on. Rulers quickly became essential trail kit for long distance exploration and don’t get me started on the weight of a rucksack for a ‘walk’ to be considered a ‘hike’, something to do with a ratio of body weight and distance travelled but I muted my phone well before any conclusions were made.

Given the trifactor of an addictively competitive scoring system, the cathartic pleasure of winding people up over what’s app and January just generally being bleak and depressing the competition, now in its fourth year, has become an overwhelming success in the hearts and minds of the growing number who play by its elusive rules.

I can’t quite recall how it all began. I know it was the brainchild of Dangerous Dave the ‘Disco-locator’, known for his penchant to dislocate his shoulder whilst break dancing in the student union and I have been told the famous spreadsheet is the mathematical work of ‘Stiff Wooley’ who once got inappropriately excited whilst dressed as a sheep but other than that the challenge’s origins, much like their competitors’ antics, are already consigned to myth and mystery, perhaps rightly so.  The early participant’s within the DJFC clique all loosely shared an affiliation with the Glasgow University Sports Association or GUSA as we aggressively chanted after 10 pints of Snake-bite. Whilst I may be doing a few a disservice, I think we shared the bond back then of all being distinctly average athletes and rather phenomenal drinkers. Quite a number of these characters that now occupy a large proportion of my phone’s storage capacity for one month of the year I only really knew in the context of avant-garde fancy dress, pub crawls and sharing the same love of refusing to go home at the end of a night. I knew little of their personal circumstance but a lot about the mischief they were willing to participate in after a gallon of stale lager. Of course, the GUSA clique or perhaps more accurately the lifestyle that came with it couldn’t last forever. There was talk at some stage of an alma mater sorority / frat house dedicated to average sporting achievement and specialising in unique concepts of fun but by then the students in us had likely grown tired of warm beers and cold beans. Maybe we’d just grown up - a job, house and family somehow seemed like a more fulfilling path to follow.

Those paths for us, all lead in different ways and to different places. Now, looking back at the identity crisis of departing from the flock I can safely say I got a little too wrapped up in my own path, running towards the horizon too quickly perhaps, to stay properly up to date with the goings on of this great group with whom I’d shared such oddly hilarious and uniquely remarkable times with. When I began to slow down in my late 20s I lamented not doing better at staying in touch.  One day back in 2017 a notification appeared on my phone from an unknown number, the cynical sarcasm it was written with was clearly the work of some Glasgow sporting high jinks, it was ‘Dangerous Dave’ asking if I was up for getting involved with some challenge he was concocting. My response was immediate.

As it turned out the remnants of the class of 2014 lucky enough to find themselves on the Disco-locators mailing list all shared very similar traits in their paths out of the SU and into adult life. For example, we’d all got pretty into endurance sports and preferred our weekends at a slightly faster pace to our 9-5 colleagues. Many, in fact, had not entertained the working day at all and rather enviably appeared to have made a comfortable living out of their outdoor pursuits. Adventurous exploits and outdoor activity seemed to be the common thread. Running, cycling, climbing and skiing seemed the most popular choices with swimming and surfing a close second. Pedestrian ‘sports’ like golf don’t get a look in, or do if you are willing to be lambasted for several hours a day in a what app group. Basically, we all like fleeces and down jackets, own tents and have enough ‘not as bad as that time when…’ stories between us to write one of those books that gets left behind in youth hostels. The bigger trend perhaps is that we are all very competitive without the associated seriousness that most competitive people drag themselves down with. Saying that though, the yardstick of park run times or distance cycled gets dragged up far too often for us to be considered anywhere close to cool.

 
The group has grown over its years to include friends of friends, partners and all those curious in the ways of DJFC. Rather than losing its collegial feel, the challenge has in fact benefitted greatly from a certain degree of anonymity. Stalking someone you’ve never met on strava to make fun of the amount of small ‘hikes’ they’re logging is, as it turns out, an oddly relaxing pastime.

Seeing our names together, listed in bold type down the first column on an empty spreadsheet at the start of January is always an enticing prospect. The blank canvas as it were before another years’ worth of combined calorie crunching colours in its corners with tales of mistrust, sabotage and sacrificing good sporting behaviour for as many points as can be squeezed out of the system’s formula-based loopholes.

After coming close for a fair few years in a row now I had earned myself a bit of a reputation as the ‘forever a bridesmaid’ competitor. Something of a fast starter, slow finisher I normally tended to begin with earnest, compensating for my December sins with enthusiasm, only to tail off come the third week with a few weak runs and a few strong ales. It was a trait that had not gone unnoticed but this year I was too invested not to give it everything in the latter stages of the month.  

By the final week I was neck and neck with fellow competitor, Kirsten. Given the fact there hadn’t been a female winner of the competition before, I was quite clearly not the favoured horse in the race and was unsuspectingly becoming public enemy number 1 and a poster boy for sporting sexism within the inner political mechanisms of the whats app thread. A case that was not helped by my decision to spend a four day cycling jaunt accumulating points in the Spanish sun whilst Kirsten soldiered on through a rather icy edition of a Glasgow winter. Despite the 3 day working week with 500 kilometres worth of points on picturesque Catalonian tarmac we were, much to the pleasure of Team Kirsten, still pretty evenly tied going into the final days.

By this stage I was checking the leader board at least four times a day and refreshing Kirsten’s strava page more often than I’d care to admit. There was only one thing I could do to guarantee my best opportunity of taking the title and that was to go after the champions’ bonus points. Having already accomplished the challenge of 28 continuous days, a story within itself given my offices’ love for late evening meetings and my own habit of forgetting suitable jogging attire, the only thing left was to set off on an overnighter with a route designed to satisfy the artistic tastes of Danny’s mum.

As I didn’t know Danny’s Mum and in fact had never actually met Danny himself, I struggled to ascertain whether she might be a cat person or a dog person. In the end I hedged my bets and created a suitably long bike route that had the head of a cat, the head of a dog and was stitched, by way of not wanting to spend Friday evening on the M25, onto the body of a camel whose hump took me to a rather unappealing bivvy spot in Broxbourne woods. The route in the end was nearly 300 kilometres long. The Dog’s head was the size of St Albans, and the Cat’s traced the outline of Chelmsford, unfortunately I’d chosen the legs of a whippet which were around 25 km each in length. The 2D projection of said legs were a good 100km of north to south action through London’s morning traffic. I cursed not employing the limbs of a pug for the submission when I realised over my morning’s BP garage breakfast that a straight-line home from the cat’s shoulders could take half an hour as opposed to the planned 4 hours in and out of Romford.

The weather was mild for a January bivvy, roads were quiet and the night was clear. The headphones stayed charged long enough for the full Arctic Monkey’s anthology and despite the uninspiring start to the weekend through London’s lesser-known sink-estates I could probably convince myself it was a worthwhile experience. After a quick lie down and a 3pm breakfast I submitted my scores to the spreadsheet and awaited the response from the what’s app mob.

As the final few extended commutes were completed and the the sun cast its last shadows on the 31st, signalling the end of DJFC 22, a quick refresh of google sheets confirmed I’d sneaked it. I instantly began rehearsing my acceptance speech in anticipation for the evening’s zoom call come awards night. My mind had already began drifting to the havoc I could wreak the following year with my champions bonus rules - perhaps everyone should ride 100k through suburban traffic for fictional points.

With another January firmly behind us, the once blank canvas of columns, rows and cells was now full with 30 unique stories of over-training, sports injuries and sobriety in an otherwise uneventful month. DJFC had served its purpose for a fourth year in a row, helping us all to keep in touch and inspire each other into mischief once again. As 20th place finisher Chris Millar put it ‘if you’ve done anymore exercise than you would have anyway, that’s a win and if you’ve had a laugh in the group chat throughout the bleak month of January that’s also a win, keep going folks’.

 . . . Christ I can’t wait to pour myself a beer and mute that group for another year.

Some pics of those rather indulgent January road miles starring Oli ‘Stiff Wooley’ himself.