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Progress (in graph form)
Graphs make my life go round.
This is my progress at the gym, with three results from week 1 of the Couch-to-5K plan, three from week 2 and one from today, the start of week 3. The blue line indicates calories as guessed by the treadmill, and the yellow one measures distance covered (in the unwieldy unit of hundredths of a mile, as it happened to be the nearest measure that would make it fit on to the same axis as the other one).
Each session consists of five minutes of walking to warm up, twenty minutes of the main workout and then five minutes gradually coming down at the end. During the first week, I stuck to alternating running and walking for one minute each during the main session, and during the second week it was for 90 seconds, with an extra attempt to run for as long as I could during the cooldown period (therefore rather defeating the point of it). At my current peak, the last session in week 2, I managed to run for a straight five minutes at the end before deciding that I would rather stop - not even feeling that I couldn't physically continue, just feeling that that was sufficient.
I managed to get through week 2 with no problems at all and it was really strange to think that I had had any difficulty running for minute-long periods at a time - my walking and running speeds started off at 2.5mph and 5.0mph respectively, but I've crept those up very gradually to 2.7 and 5.2. Week 3 may look like it involves a step down, but it involves more prolonged periods of running, and I felt more of a jump up to it than I have when I went from week 1 to 2 - I felt a bit more pain in one leg towards the end of the twenty minutes, but we'll see if that goes away within a couple more visits.
As for my primary goal going into this, it's worth mentioning that throughout this process I have lost no weight whatsoever. But I am feeling slightly livelier in general, and my endurance is undeniably increasing - I think running for five minutes would have been unimaginable just a couple of weeks ago, as small as the figure sounds when written down. I trust that eventually I'll start seeing physical differences in the later stages once I have spent enough time building up the ability to survive them.
This is my progress at the gym, with three results from week 1 of the Couch-to-5K plan, three from week 2 and one from today, the start of week 3. The blue line indicates calories as guessed by the treadmill, and the yellow one measures distance covered (in the unwieldy unit of hundredths of a mile, as it happened to be the nearest measure that would make it fit on to the same axis as the other one).
Each session consists of five minutes of walking to warm up, twenty minutes of the main workout and then five minutes gradually coming down at the end. During the first week, I stuck to alternating running and walking for one minute each during the main session, and during the second week it was for 90 seconds, with an extra attempt to run for as long as I could during the cooldown period (therefore rather defeating the point of it). At my current peak, the last session in week 2, I managed to run for a straight five minutes at the end before deciding that I would rather stop - not even feeling that I couldn't physically continue, just feeling that that was sufficient.
I managed to get through week 2 with no problems at all and it was really strange to think that I had had any difficulty running for minute-long periods at a time - my walking and running speeds started off at 2.5mph and 5.0mph respectively, but I've crept those up very gradually to 2.7 and 5.2. Week 3 may look like it involves a step down, but it involves more prolonged periods of running, and I felt more of a jump up to it than I have when I went from week 1 to 2 - I felt a bit more pain in one leg towards the end of the twenty minutes, but we'll see if that goes away within a couple more visits.
As for my primary goal going into this, it's worth mentioning that throughout this process I have lost no weight whatsoever. But I am feeling slightly livelier in general, and my endurance is undeniably increasing - I think running for five minutes would have been unimaginable just a couple of weeks ago, as small as the figure sounds when written down. I trust that eventually I'll start seeing physical differences in the later stages once I have spent enough time building up the ability to survive them.