Monday, October 12, 2009

Masochistic Mondays: week 11

The Stats (October 12, 2009)
Starting Weight: 188 lbs
Current Weight: 182.1 lbs

This past week marked the beginning of timing a 3.2 mile course while running/walking - C25K was definitely a great help in getting me to actually run for longer than 2 minutes at a time, but I got stuck at 25 minutes and wasn't increasing my distance any. A couple weeks ago, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to finish an entire 5K. I was discouraged after finding out my Nike+ was pretty far off in it's estimate of my mileage, so that only compounded feelings of defeat.

After a few too many days off from running, I came up with a solution. That I needed to start doing an entire 5K each time I go out to run. I knew I wouldn't be able to run the whole thing yet, but I would find out how long it takes me to finish and hopefully I would start to see improvement. So Monday and Wednesday of this last week I put my new plan to the test. Yes, it's getting darker earlier so near the end of my training it's dark and I'm now out for nearly an hour, but my body is beginning to know what a 5K distance is like and even in a day I saw progress.

Usually Monday is my best day to train. I'm well rested after having 2 (or more) days off. The rest of the week just gets tougher…or at least in the past had gotten tougher. Now I know only a one-time improvement can't be the mark of change in a pattern, but this past week Wednesday went great. It was tough, I didn't feel like being out there. From nearly the beginning of running I felt like I needed to stop, but I kept pushing myself, telling myself "at least get to the next stoplight." And before I knew it was coming up on the spot where my official cool down began on Monday and I still hadn't reached my one minute warning yet! In the end, I trimmed three minutes off my 3.2 mile time. I still have a lot of minutes left to trim off to get to an acceptable 5K time, but progress equals Victory in my book!

I'm actually thinking that I may start doing evening runs on Monday & Wednesday (what I already do) and then a morning run on Saturday (I'm supposed to be doing an evening run on Friday, but that hasn't been panning out for the past few weeks). Then I'll get a taste of running in the morning, especially since the weather is cooling down mighty fast, so come race day in November it won't be a shock to my system. That and I won't need to take the whole week off before the race to feel fresh because my body will be used to the schedule that gives two days off before Saturday.

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