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Unbroken

4x4x48 Challenge Planner

Four miles, every four hours, for forty-eight hours. Twelve legs, forty-eight miles, and a clock that does not care how you feel at 04:00. Pick your start and the whole schedule lands below, with the night hours drawn on it — leg n begins four hours after leg one whatever time you finished the last one, so running early buys rest and nothing else.

Forty-eight hours, drawn to scale

The shaded stretches are 22:00 to 06:00. Every tick is a departure; the ones inside the shade are the legs you plan sleep around.

The twelve departures

    Copy gives you twelve plain lines to paste wherever you will actually look at 02:00. Starting early is fine — the page counts down to leg 1.

    The method

    How the clock is worked out

    The whole challenge is one piece of arithmetic: four miles every four hours for forty-eight hours. Twelve legs, forty-eight miles, and leg n starts exactly four hours after leg one — the tracker computes it as your start time plus (n − 1) × four hours and never from when you actually finished the leg before. That is the point of the format. Finishing a leg early buys you rest; it does not move the next start.

    A leg cannot be ticked before its clock has come round. The button is inert until then, because a run where you can bank legs in advance is a different and much easier challenge.

    The drawing across the top is a fixed 48-hour axis: 960 viewBox units over 48 hours, so one hour is 20 units and the picture cannot stretch to flatter a slow run. Two things are drawn onto it from your actual start time. The night bands are every 22:00-to-06:00 stretch that overlaps your 48 hours, clipped to them — at most three can fit, and where they land is the honest answer to which legs you will be doing in the dark. The midnight lines are the calendar day boundaries inside the window, again at most three.

    Minutes on feet are yours to type per leg, 1 to 999, and they are summed rather than modelled: the tracker holds no pace assumption and predicts nothing. It knows what you told it.

    The format is David Goggins' challenge and it is his name on it, not ours. Nothing on this page is coaching. Forty-eight hours of interrupted sleep and forty-eight miles is a serious undertaking and the site's own note about that runs in the footer of this page.

    Unbroken counts days. It does not measure anything about your body, and nothing above is medical, nutritional or fitness advice. Where a number here is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.

    The clock is the opponent

    Four miles is an ordinary run for most people who attempt this. Twelve of them, four hours apart, is a sleep problem wearing running shoes. Four of the twelve legs leave in the dark whatever start time you choose — a four-hour cycle puts two departures inside every night — and that is exactly when your judgement is worst and going back to bed sounds most reasonable. Which is the whole argument for writing the schedule in daylight: at 03:40 there is nothing left to decide, only a time on a list and a pair of shoes by the door. Work the gaps backwards too — a leg takes forty minutes, eating and changing takes another twenty, so the sleep window is about three hours, not four.

    One honest note, and the disclaimer at the bottom of this page says it as well: forty-eight sleep-broken miles is a real physical event. Eat and drink during the short gaps rather than at the end of them, treat the night legs as slower by design, and stop for any pain that changes the way you walk — a stride that has started protecting something is not a leg you finish. Scaling the distance down to two miles or thirty minutes keeps the thing intact; the four-hour structure is the part that makes it hard.

    The questions

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the 4x4x48 challenge?
    Run 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours — 12 runs, 48 miles total. It was popularised by David Goggins, who hosts an annual community running of it, usually in early March. You can run your own any weekend; this planner is independent and not affiliated with him.

    How does the 4x4x48 schedule work?
    Pick a start time and every leg is fixed from there: twelve departures, four hours apart. Start Friday 20:00 and you finish with a Sunday 16:00 leg. Between legs you have roughly three hours once you have run, eaten and changed — the schedule is the challenge.

    Can I walk or scale the distance?
    Yes. Walkers and beginners commonly do 2 miles or 30 minutes per leg on the same clock. Keeping the every-4-hours structure is what makes it the challenge; the distance is adjustable.

    When do you sleep during 4x4x48?
    In the gaps. After a night leg you have about 2.5–3 usable hours; people sleep dressed, twice, and nap once in the day. Plan the sleep windows before you start — at 3am nobody plans well.

    Does this planner save my progress?
    Yes. Your schedule and completed legs are stored in your browser on this device.
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