I did Session 2, Week 1 in the Couch to 5K programme today. I think this will become my regular routine, Mondays, Wednesdays before the kindy pick up and one on the weekend. I’m still debating whether I do my existing Zumba class too on Mondays as well as my Thursday night class, but I hope to.
I pulled up okay after my first session on Monday, my thighs were a bit achy, but all in all, I felt good.
I decided to change up the location today, to Burleigh Esplanade, hoping the sea breeze would help keep me cool, since it’s a hot day and I only had the early afternoon at my disposal.
I started out well, after a 5 minute warm up; I was alternating between 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking. Sounds easy-breezy, doesn’t it? Well, it was... for the first 5 minutes! After that, my legs that had just been a bit achy were turning to concrete stumps and I discovered the downside to Burleigh. It’s real busy, even on a weekday afternoon, and it’s jam-packed with uber-fit people running up and down. I started to feel very noticeable.
The other downside is that my usually energetic training partner, my dog Scout, decided to turn traitor. Maybe it was all the new smells, the heat, or maybe it was the heaps of other dogs strolling around, but he decided running was over-rated. If I had thought I was slowing down before, hauling along a reluctant Labrador certainly wasn’t helping.
Lesson Learned: Don’t make a Labrador Run....
My poured-in-place legs were only able to achieve this dilapidated kind of shuffle, and my self-consciousness levels were rapidly rising. I felt like an absolute tool, shuffling along in a half-hearted jog and stopping every minute, while supermodels and action heroes blew past me, effortlessly eating up the pavement.
I simply wasn’t able to keep alternating between running and walking, my legs just couldn’t do it. I may have been able to keep up with a little shuffle-step, but honestly, I was too self-conscious. I felt like everyone was looking at me and judging me, the red-faced, pudgy girl who can’t run.
Then I thought, “Oh, hang it. They don’t know me, I don’t know them. Why do I care about what they think?”
I spent the last 10 minutes mainly walking back, determinedly adding in a quick run where I could, (admittedly only 2 or 3 times, but it was really all I felt capable of), no matter how stupid I felt I looked.
I’ve decided to repeat this stage until I can complete the whole 20 minutes of alternating, and then move on. I’m a little down-hearted that I wasn’t able to do it, but I have decided to be kind on myself. It didn’t take me 9 weeks to get this way, so I won’t be able to fix it in 9 weeks.
This is a big breakthrough for me, usually I am very tough on myself, expecting way too much, and then getting very down on myself when I don’t meet those expectations. Part of my new “fit inside and out” mentality came from a decision I made a little while ago to be easier on myself, to care about myself and give myself all the breaks and understanding I would extend to a good friend. For more of my thoughts on this subject, you can check out a guest post I wrote on Sharnanigans a while back.
I’ve also decided that unless I’m running at the dog park, where the dog can do his own thing, I’m running solo.
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