Couch To 5k–Week 1

Now that the Outsourcing My Body project is over and done with I am looking for something to keep the momentum going.  If you are familiar with that project then you know that I am not good at setting goals (or more specifically to be motivated to think about setting goals).  Trying to meet a goal once it is set is something I can do easily enough (especially if there is a spreadsheet involved).  I sort of arrived at this project in a backwards way.

On the way home from church last Sunday the wife needed to stop by 2 stores.  Not particularly interested in either store, I decided to go to a 3rd store that was in the same strip of stores.  I took the son with me (more out of keeping the kids separated as they are in a funk lately about arguing constantly).  While in that store I saw a pair of running shoes on sale for a decent price.  They fit and I happened to have my clothing money with me (thank you Dave Ramsey) so I bought them.

My current manager (and my manager before him and a few teammates) used to run quite a bit so I thought that (if for no other reason to be able to discuss running with them) I would see if there were any training plans for beginning runners out there on the internet.  The first one that I happened upon was the Couch-To-5K plan.  It had a 9 week plan to get you up to running 3 miles (roughly 5k) and thus a new project (this one) was born.  Even though I am not a couch potato starting out, I think this will work for me.

There are several reasons why I do not call myself a couch potato…

1. I rarely sit on the couch.  Now this may be a trivial distinction but when I am sitting down it is mostly in my office chair (either at my work office or at my home office).  When I find myself in the family room with the rest of the family, they hog the couch and I tend either to stand up (I sit down all day at work) or I sit in the recliner.  Also, I do not find our current couch confortable.  It was a hand me down from my grandma and we really need to replace it (not so much due to it being old but in that it has that “80+ year old woman” décor that just does not go with the rest of our furniture – but beggars can’t be choosers).
2. I do not watch that much TV.  The wife and I watch a 30 minute show while drinking our first cup of coffee in the morning (we like The Colbert Report) and that is usually done in our bedroom.  Also, we do not have cable or satellite TV.  We have not had it since 2007.  We either watch a show online or we watch it on DVD.  We (as a family) are currently watching season 1 of I Love Lucy, season 1 of The Walton’s and season 2 of The A Team (don’t judge us).  Previously we watched all 10 seasons of Little House On The Prairie and the first 2 seasons of The Facts Of Life.
3. I spent the last 3 months or so working out or at least walking 1 1/2 miles each day.  I am not starting from scratch by any means.

So with that background information in mind you might believe me when I say that week 1 of this program was not too challenging.  The instructions were pretty simple.

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

Sounds simple but I did have a problem, namely how to keep time.  There is an app to download but I do not have a smart phone so I had to think a bit.  In the end I fired up Audacity and spliced together 20 minutes worth of music as one long mp3 file with sounds that occur at the allotted times when I should start or stop jogging.  This was kind of fun to do actually and right after I finish this blog I am going to start in on the week 2 mix (since there are different lengths of jogging and walking in week 2, I need a different mix).

I can remember getting up to being able to run 1 mile straight only one time in my adult life and that was right after I was first married (15 years ago).  For some reason there is something about being able to run a mile for me.  I don’t know why.  Being able to run 3 miles straight is something I cannot fathom right now so I will focus on getting to 1 mile and that does not happen until week 5.

Jon