Was it last winter I started the Couch to 5K? Or the winter before that? I can't remember. This is what happens to you when you have children, get old, and have ADD. Things just fall out of your head, timeframes mean little to nothing. For crying out loud, I gave my ex a "Happy 40th" birthday card on his 41st birthday because somehow a whole year had slipped my memory banks.
So anyway, what was I saying?
Couch to 5K. Started it one winter. I printed out a training plan, and of course if you're starting from point of not running at all, you build up your stamina incrementally. To do this, you don't just hit the pavement and start running. You start with walk/run intervals, gradually increasing the time of the running and decreasing the time of the walking. So the first week you're doing 8 short intervals, the next week you're doing 6 and so forth.
I bought a runner's watch that had a function to set intervals, and honestly, it was that whole part of it (well, that and my crappy shoes) that borked it for me. If I didn't remember to reset to all the new intervals for the following week, I would be getting up at 4:30 to go run and by the time I'd spent a half hour figuring out how to set my new intervals, I'd be pretty much out of time to actually engage in the run. Plus, the times I did run with it, I was also listening to my MP3 player, and it was hard to hear the beeping, and unless I wore my glasses, I couldn't actually see the watch. Usually I wear my glasses when I'm running, but not if its raining, and if I wanted to listen to music and check the watch face at the same time on a rainy day, forget it. I could wear rain-spotted glasses and half-assed see my watch, or wear no glasses at all and be completely unable to see it. And it was winter and it was dark and my knees started hurting (probalby because of the horribad shoes) and oh, there are all kinds of reasons. So I quit, quietly and really truly without a tremendous amount of guilt. It was too much work just to do a simple run.
I continued to still work out regularly, doing Bikram once a week, Vinyasa a couple of other days and a cardio thrown in here and there. But even though I'm not a great runner, there is a part of me that enjoys running. I want to do it, and I want to be able to run for long enough for it to be considered an actual workout (since its been kindly pointed out to me that running after the dog who is trying to eat the chicken is not actual exercise). But I know the only way to really make it work is to plan it and expand my stamina gradually, and every time I've thought about starting up again, I've balked as soon as I hit the planning segment and thought about programming that damn watch.
This summer, when SG was picking up a pair of special order shoes, he was sweet enough to get me to get fitted for a decent pair of running shoes. And then a few weeks ago while trying to figure out which of the forty-odd workout DVD's I wanted to torture myself with, I remembered those new running shoes, and I got them out of the closet. And then I looked at that runner's watch sitting on my dresser with a fine layer of dust, and I thought to myself, "There has to be a better way."
As it turns out, there is.
There's an app for that! Several of them, actually, but I found one that works perfectly for me. All I have to do is tap on the Start My Run icon and then select which day of which week it is (I finished Week 2 Day 3 yesterday). It lets me play music from my phone while I'm running, and when the nice lady interjects to tell me to change from walking to running or to inform me of my current pace and distance covered, she very politely mutes the music so that I can hear her. And because I know how far I'm going and how fast I'm going, I'm more motivated than before because the desire to improve makes me try harder.
I've gone every other day for two weeks. Over two weeks I've seen improvement every run. And no, I'm not going to tell you how far I'm running because HELLO, SLOW. But I have my average pace under a 9 minute mile for the parts I'm running, and I'm feeling really energetic and motivated and committed to keeping this up.
I doubt I'll ever run a marathon or even a half marathon, and I'll never "look" like a runner. And perhaps what I do is less running and more like jogging sort of fast, but so what? It feels good, I feel healthy for doing it, and that's what matters.
