So, I've completed my first week of running as a hobby. This is something I've tried on and off for a decade or so (mostly off), but always found an excuse to avoid it. Well, I'm out of excuses, and here's why. Those of you who have been around me for the past few months might have known I've lost a few extra pounds.
Alexis joined WeightWatchers awhile back to help lose some of the baby weight, and I felt the need to join her on this path. We officially started out on this path on April 1st. One thing they encourage is walking... it starts off nice and easy. In fact, it was easy to slip in a 20-30 minute walk on my lunch break that I started doing that pretty regularly. Not bad. It worked quite well. Then, the weather got really hot down here in Texas... 66+ days over 100 so far these season. Noon didn't seem like such a good time to walk anymore, so I started getting up early to walk -- that's where things started getting interesting, because I kept walking further and further... until I was up to 1.5 hours without feeling like I got much out of it.
So, for awhile I hopped back on my bike and did that for a few weeks, getting my normal 5-6 mile circuit time down from 45 minutes to 25... but it didn't provide much of a challenge, and looping that circuit was a bit boring. So, I decided to try mixing some running into the morning walk. I started off slow, a count of thirty in my head to run for a stint, and then walk until I caught my breath again. Amazingly, I was able to do that -- I never had much confidence in my running ability. So I tried it the next day... and the day after that, my knee started throbbing. Aw -- I knew there would be something.
After a couple of weeks, and a vacation, I decided that I should give it a proper go. So, on the advice of other friends that are runners, I went to RunTex to get 'fitted' for a shoe. Now, I'm the kind of guy who buys $30 sneakers, so I was not looking forward to this. My experience at the store was less than desirable, mostly because I felt the salesperson seemed to think I was an inconvenience and I had to ask explictly for everything... not exactly good for a beginner. He did watch my gait and recommended a 'motion control' shoe, which at least let me look up on the Internet what the heck that meant later. After a couple more visits, I ended up with a pair of Adidas Foundation 8s.
So, I was finally ready to run. I picked some random training program off of the Internet (I'm not sure I could find it again if I tried) that looked as easy as I could. Basically, it's an 8 week plan to be able to run for 2 miles (this plays into that confidence thing). I'm still a little nervous I'm going to blow out a knee or something crazy, so this looked good to me at the time. The first week of the plan starts off with running for one minute, walking for 2 minutes, and repeat that ten times.
I managed to figure out how to program my watch to beep at the appropriate times for this plan, so I didn't have to pay attention to what I was doing... I just have to hit a button when I switched from walking to running and vice versa -- nice. I found that a minute of running was roughly equivalent to my count of thirty in my head, so I was already a bit prepared for this training.
I've now completed the first week of my training, which amounts to 4 runs in 7 days, plus a couple of days of just walking. Next week, I'll be programming the watch every day as the training steps up the time running from here on out, but I'm encouraged. My one knee aches a bit today, so I'll be taking tomorrow off, but this is nowhere near the pain I had when I first started. I'm also feeling quite a bit more accomplished, so I decided to write this blog post as a pat on the back for myself. ;-)