Never stop running

[davidn]

Progress at the gym this month hasn't looked terribly good since the last time I updated it. The unprecedented target of running for two straight miles really did mess up my ankle a bit, and then after going on holiday and being somewhat ill for a while, we let our previously well-kept routine of three visits a week slide - I've only added four more entries to the graph since the start of the month.


But even when doing it less, it's surprising how your increased stamina doesn't vanish. After just one exhausting session, doing the same thing again is significantly easier, as if your body completely rebuilds your legs overnight in order to cope with what it assumes is a rapid transition from office worker to hunter-gatherer. Starting the graph's axis at the nadir of 160 makes this less obvious than it could be, but I'm now achieving almost double the (apparent) calories that I used to when I started off, and a significantly greater distance - it's beginning to become difficult to believe that going for one and a half miles felt like moving at all.

I'm sort of hovering halfway through tier 6 now, where running in five-minute bursts is the minimum and running for mile-long stretches is more common. Yesterday I was ambitious and ran a full 20 minutes again - that's what the timer said, but while actually there and watching it tick up it felt like 19 minutes and then about three more years. This time, though, I'm not suffering any post-exercise injury at all.

The workouts from here get significantly duller, being just stretches of running slightly greater distances until the five-kilometre mark, but I think that my next step will be to slowly increase my running speed and see if I can get to a point where one mile really is ten minutes - 0.8mph doesn't sound like all that much of a difference...

Comments

[kjorteo]

Fitness is a funny thing, in that it always seems so strange comparing what you can do now to what you used to not be able to do ... that first time you have to do two miles of jogging with no rest in the Couch to 5K plan, I feared that I was going to die when I tried it, or something. Now I do three just as my default routine (even doing it outside on the rough track whenever I can to multitask and get a foot workout in while I'm at it) and, you know, that's just sort of what I do. Two would leave me feeling unfinished at this point.

And you! You just described the final progression as "significantly duller," whereas you used to compare it to wrestling a minotaur.

Anyway, congratulations, as always. :)