Running Milestone

For the last week and a half I have been trying to complete one of my workouts from The Couch-to-5K Running Plan. I got stuck on the week 4 workout: 3 minute run, 90 second walk, 5 minute run, REPEAT. I was fine until the second 5 minute run. I just couldn’t make it. Finally I did it yesterday. Barely. I am definitely thrilled that I can see my improvement over the last few weeks, but I was disappointed that I just plateau’ed and couldn’t make it through the second 5 minutes. I hope today or tomorrow when I run, I’ll be able to do it again.

My feet continue to get hot quickly. I think I am going to take Jenny’s suggestion and head to a Fleet Feets for evaluation and maybe a new (hopefully inexpensive) pair of running shoes.

In the meantime I am going to keep going through my Couch-to-5K plan. It’s really been quite helpful. Saturday I am biking with some friends in the a.m. and as soon as I park my bike I’m going to do the workout again. I know I probably won’t be able to run the whole 5K but I’m going to shoot for it, set my goal as high as possible. Even just knowing that I’ve come this far is a good achievement.

The Tri event is not far off!

Run barracuda, run

Still a little peeved about the swimming, but I’m headed back to the pool today.   I was looking for some sort of thing to get myself motivated and on the right track again, so I did the whole 5K last night on the treadmill in a time of 65:22.  I did run a total of 3.5 and interdispersed some walking in there for the rest.  Felt good, but I want to combine that with the bike or swim and see how I do; maybe this weekend.

Couch to 5K Running Plan

Love Picasso’s running women, but pray for no tri-wardrobe malfunctions!

Well it’s time to get going on the running/jogging portion of my triathlon training. I can swim 750 and bike 12 miles (though not together yet) but I can’t run more than 1 minute without keeling over. So I thought I’d try the “Couch to 5K Running Plan” from the CoolRunning.com web site. Very handy little plan. When I had run before, this is basically how I started — the walk / jog thing, even if by minute increments. Back then I worked up to a 45 minute jog. Don’t know I can do that this time around, but I’ll give it a shot. In the meantime, I’m hoping that the running will jump start my metabolism. My tamoxifen-influenced body is not wont to give up the pounds, but I’m going to do my best to drop some weight. I’m eating better — actually I’ve been eating healthily for a while, just that portion-control thing that gets me.

So there are three workouts per week for this running plan. I did my first jog on Monday and today I’m going to do the second workout. Here’s what this week’s workouts are:

Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

First workout went okay. I did fine but towards the end of the 20 minutes I was gasping for breath. We’ll see how it goes today.