Fit Friday: Week 4

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WEEK 4 UPDATE:

--Begin with a five-minute warm-up run; then jog for 3 minutes, walk 90 seconds, jog 5 minutes, walk 2.5 minutes, jog 3 minutes, walk 90 seconds, jog 5 minutes.


Tuesday, January 24--2.172 miles--234.6 calories
Thursday, January 26--1.885 miles--205.6 calories
Friday, January 27--2.33 miles--250 calories
     + Monday, January 23, 2011--1.101 miles--115.2 calories
     + Monday, January 23, 2011--0.5 miles--50+ calories

This week was a toughy.  For some reason on Monday I could NOT get through the five-minute portion of the run.  My first attempt I made it through the three-minute run but couldn't get through the five minute run, so that night I decided to just see if I could run five minutes straight.  That's it.  I told myself I wouldn't have to run the whole thing that day; I could just be done after five minutes of nothing but running...and I totally did it!  It was actually way hard, but I felt really proud of myself when I was done.

So Tuesday I went hard and tried to tackle the whole thing...and succeeded!!  By the end of the run I was feeling like I could run a marathon.  Not that I actually could because I was way too tired.  And then when I was thinking about how hard it was for me to run for five minutes I felt completely pathetic!!  Only five minutes??  Really?!?  I felt like I was never going to finish this 5K training if I could barely get through five minutes of running at a time.

The one thing that gave me motivation to keep going was looking back on my first day of running, and how tough it was for me to run 60 seconds at a time even with a 90-second walk in between each run.  Knowing I had already come so far from that was a big boost.

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In my first Fit Friday post I mentioned that I hung up my training plan in front of my treadmill.  Right on the wall of my living room.  I love having it there because it's so cute and TOTALLY goes with all the decor in my house.  NOT.  But I really do like it there because it 1) gives me something to look at while I'm running, 2) I can see how far I've come and remember back to how I felt running, and 3) I can see what goals I have coming up and see that they are attainable because of what I'm doing now.  I also printed out a spreadsheet from Excel so right afterward I can write down what date I accomplish what part of my run, how far I ran and how many calories I (supposedly) burned during that run.  This is great because I can easily see how I'm doing and if I'm on track.  I look at this a lot too when I'm running, and I try to go farther than the day before or burn more calories and kind of challenge myself.

I've heard of a lot of people putting up inspiration pictures in front of their treadmill or on the fridge or in the mirror so they see what they want to look like and get motivated, but I haven't done that (mostly cause I think it would be awkward to have swimsuit models hanging up all over my house).  I saw this and thought it was so seriously funny that I might change my mind on that now.

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