A Journey To Fitness

Last week I hit a new milestone of running for more than 5 minutes. During two of my workouts last week I took my last 4 minute run and decided to run for a longer amount of time. The first workout I ran 6 minutes and the second 7 minutes. These are both pretty significant to me because I had never run for more than 5 minutes in one get go. Last night I started week 5 of my plan which is 5 minute jog/1 minute walk. I always do a 5 minute warm-up and 5 minute cool down. I won't say it wasn't hard because it was. I think there's a difference between doing 4 minutes and at the end adding a few extra minutes knowing the workout is almost over than adding a minute to every segment. I know the more I do it the easier it will get but jogging is still difficult for me. I do find that the further into the workout the better I feel. I think I need to find a better way to stretch/warm-up my legs because I find that I'm still pretty stiff till about halfway through my second jogg...

Well I got off track for about a week and a half both on the exercising and eating right track. I'm back on again after a good workout tonight. I'm hoping the slipups are done and the rest of the time I'll be able to keep up my motivation. I won't lie it's hard and sometimes it's just easier to sit on the couch or go to bed early or to eat the chocolate because it's there and it would be wasteful to throw it out. Excuses...excuses... and not very good ones at that. Despite taking off over a week and a half tonight's workout was actually pretty good. I did 4 minute jogging intervals and then for the 4th intverval I continued to run to see how much longer I could run. I ran for 6 minutes total and I probably could have done more but I didn't want to push it. I am going to try to do that each workout that the last jogging interval extend the time I jog by at least 1 minutes if not more. I decided since I really didn't do week 4 very well to redo t...

So today the temps outside were in the 80s. It was 84 degrees as I was coming home at 5:30pm. Now the weather doesn't affect my running too much based on the fact that I run inside. However both the heat and the AC have been off since mid april due to the weather mostly being in the mid 50's to mid 60s. Needless to say the house was a bit warm and the basement (where the treadmill is was warm as well). Because I can't seem to get my act together and get out of bed in the morning I am still doing my workout at night. Being in week 4 the workout goes something like this 5 minute warm up, 4 minute job, 1 minute walk, repeat 3 more times, 5 minute cool down. Last time I did this was Monday night. I did not intend to skip so many days in between. I was going to work out Tuesday evening but by the time Maddie was in bed and I was packed for my trip it was already 10:30pm. I packed my workout clothes so I could workout when I got into Milwaukee and got to the hotel. Unfortunately...

Well after a sucky week last week where I only got in two workouts I thought about redoing week three. The key word here is thought. In the end I decided that I would try week four and if I had issues than I would do week three again. I think sometimes going into a workout with a bit of optimism is helpful. It gets you over those bumps in the road and helps you to just keep going. So needless to say I made it through the first workout of week four. We'll see tomorrow night whether it was just a fluke. I'm beginning to get few things as I run more each week and each workout. Two months ago if you had asked me whether in a 20 minute period if I could run 16 of those minutes I would have said no way. But now after a few weeks of somewhat consistent workouts and increasing time/distance I am learning to do it. I know it will be a work in progress but I am committed to getting there if only to see the end result. I am learning that I can do more than I think I can, that my body ...

So we are on week three and so far so good. In 30 minutes I did 1.92 miles so obviously we are getting closer each week. I will say that while it is not getting easier it isn't as hard as it was 2 weeks ago. We are in week three which means the running segments are 3 minutes each with a 1 minute break in between. This is also the last week of 30 minute workouts. To get in a little more time of jogging I will be moving up to 35-45 minutes for the next few weeks. Workout 1 - 30 Minutes 1.92 miles Workout 2 - 30 minutes 1.90 miles (tough with side cramps) Unfortunately for last week I only did 2 of my planned 3-4 workouts. Knowing those weeks will happen doesn't make it any easier to swallow when they do happen, especially when it is so early in the workout cycle. But I am slowly learning to just move on. On the plus side Saturday did consist of quite a bit of walking and I just missed my 10k steps by about 400. Onward we go - I'll just strive for a better week next week.

I knew there would be hard workouts and tonight marked the first one. By hard I mean one of those workouts where you don't get to do what you had planned. Now I did finish the workout and I did do the full 30 minutes however this is the week I was supposed to do 3 minute runs with the 1 minute walk in between. During my first 3 minute segment I got bad side cramps. I finished the first 3 minute run portion and then had to add 30 seconds to my first in between walk. Then I ran 2 1/2 minutes the second segment. The cramps were still bad but I figured I would do the 1 minute regardless and run what i could. So tonight instead of 3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1 I did 3,1.5,2.5,1,2,1,2,1,3.5,1.5. All in all not bad and I was glad to see that I could do the 3.5 minutes at the end. In my opinion there are 2 reasons that tonight was difficult. The first being that because of some poor planning on my part I was unable to run for 3 nights. The second was that I didn't eat the best of food tonight. On ...