Taking part in Five A Day February

Five A Day February is a Sport Walk Personal Challenge to walk 5km (about 3 miles) every day throughout February.

The challenge starts on February 1st and you then need to walk a minimum of 5km each day, ending with the last walk on February 28th. If you want to run or run/walk you can, the only condition is that you complete the distance each day on foot.

How it works

Step 1 – Set yourself up on Strava then walk 5k every day!

We’re using Strava as the means of recording and confirming completion of the challenge (although it’s not compulsory) and our Strava Club is the main challenge HQ, where participants can share their walks each day and get kudos and encouragement from other users. Strava is free to use and easy to sign up to if you’re not already using it, so it’s the perfect platform.

For those already using Strava, your means of tracking your daily walks and obtaining your personal record of achievement for the challenge is already active.

If you’re not yet a Strava user, you can sign up for a free account that gives you full functionality to track your walks, either by paring a sports watch or by using the app on your phone, which gives you all you need, including distance and pace!

For either option, once you’re on Strava you’re ready to track your Five A Day February walks and that’s essentially all you need to do to take on the challenge. But keeping it to yourself isn’t much fun, so share your daily walks with us on Strava so we and the wider Sport Walk community can give you kudos and support.

To do this, you’ll need to join the Sport Walk Strava Club (if you’re not already a member) and then share your walks with the club each day. That way, both the Sport Walk team and all the club members will be able to see your Five A Day activities and give you encouragement to keep you motivated.

Step 2 – Fundraising

In 2026, we’re asking everyone who takes part to fundraise for, or make a donation to, our mental health charity partner – Sport In Mind. It’s not a compulsory to fundraise in order to take part but we do hope as many as possible will seek sponsorship from friends or family for their efforts or make a small donation themselves.

Five A Day February is supporting Sport In Mind

The fundraising hub for Sport In Mind is Just Giving and you can create your own fundraising sub-page connected to the main challenge page, to keep everything simple and easy. Just click on the button below to go through to Just Giving.

Go to Just Giving

Get walking (or running if you prefer)!

The challenge starts on the 1st February and you must start then – there’s no ‘playing catch up’ with this challenge, you either walk everyday through February or you don’t!

All you have to do is walk 5km every day, starting on the 1st and ending on 28th February, that’s it! As this is a Sport Walking challenge, we recommend walking outdoors but you can walk on a treadmill if you prefer or if there’s bad weather.

You can split the distance into two or more walks a day if you wish or need to because of time constraints. Your daily total is what matters not how you achieve that overall 5km distance.

If you prefer, you can go longer, just like Jack from Canada who decided to walk 20km every day (read his story here), although we wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re an experienced Sport Walker! As long as you walk a minimum of 5km, you can decide how far you want to go.

As we mentioned above, you can run if you prefer or mix it up and run/walk but you must complete your daily distance on foot. This is a foot sport challenge only.

Track, log and share

Each day, when you go out to walk, make sure you have your watch or Strava app on your phone set to record the activity. Start tracking when you start your effort. If you want to warm up first, you can either track that distance as a part of the whole distance or warm up first then start your effort, it’s up to you. As long as you complete 5km it doesn’t matter.

If you’re walking on a treadmill, unless your watch is able to link to the treadmill and record the distance, you’ll need to take a photograph of the final distance from the treadmill display and then post a ‘Manual Activity’ on Strava, with the photograph confirming the distance you record.

There’s no pace or speed component with Five A Day February, it’s all about distance over the month, so you don’t need to worry about how fast you go, although it is good, from a challenge perspective, to hold a strong pace, so your achievement means more to you.

Keep Strava or your watch running until you’ve completed at least 5km then stop and upload the activity. If you divide the daily 5km up into shorter walks at different points in the day, just record each one naming it something like “Day 1, walk 1” and then “Day 1, walk 2” etc, so it’s clear both to you and everyone else what you’ve done. If you do split your sessions, you don’t need to also post a daily total. As long as you have records to show that you’ve completed the daily distance, you’ll know you’ve done it and everyone will be able to see your composite posts to confirm, if they want to.

Because this is a Sport Walk Personal Challenge, verifying your distance overall is more for your own satisfaction and, of course, to confirm success to your sponsors. There are no medals or prizes, so we don’t need formally to verify individual performances for compliance but we will be keeping track of everyone’s posts in the Strava Club and will use that to give formal confirmation that individuals have successfully completed the challenge.

Challenge completion

Once the challenge is complete and we’ve verified that you have gone the distance, we’ll make contact and provide you with a link to download a ‘badge’ that you can post on your socials to confirm that you’ve completed Five A Day February.

We realise it’s not much but we want this challenge to be all about the benefits you get from doing it, in terms of personal development, rather than physical trophy rewards.

The greatest thing you can earn is the respect of your peers for the achievements you make and that’s what Sport Walk Personal Challenges are all about.

If you’ve received sponsorship from friends or family for the challenge, just provide them with the evidence from your Strava feed (if they want it) and then follow the procedures on Just Giving to pass funds on to Sport In Mind.

If you haven’t secured sponsorship for your efforts but would like to donate to Sport In Mind, please also follow instructions on Just Giving in order to do this.

Help and support

If you have any questions or need some advice about taking part, please reach out to us in the Strava Club, on Facebook or Instagram and we’ll get back you, promise!

As you go through the challenge, we’d love it if you also post any photos or an account of each walk on the Sport Walk Community page on Facebook, as well as in the Strava Club, so that our wider community can also support your efforts and you can also ask us any questions you have while the challenge is going on.

This might be just about pacing yourself or it could be that you want to understand better how the challenge overall will help you. Whatever it is, just reach out and we’ll do our best to help.