Rusty's Blog

First of all, I don’t think my c25k program should be considered entirely successful. First of all while I did my final ‘run’ tonight, I didn’t run 30 min, and wasn’t really expecting to. In a way this is really a new program that I started, though I doubt that I am the only one to have done something like this.

My short term objective is to run a 5K a week from Saturday. I’ve got just under 2 weeks to do this. I actually have a 5k ‘course’ in my neighborhood that I am going to be ‘training’ on. It’s actually just barely short of a 5k loop, but I will be able to use it, and the walk in/out for the loop will take care of the rest I’m pretty sure.

Tonight I walked and ran the course in about 40 min. My immediate goal is to bring the time down from 40 min to under 30 min. As the final run of week 8 shows, I can run 28 min straight on a flat surface, and I suspect that with little effort I can turn that into 30 min as part of my current program. However I’m pretty sure that I’m not running a mile and a half out, and a mile and a half back as part of that 30 min, which means I need to deal with the distance as well in the next two weeks.

I wrote once a wile back of my running when I was stationed overseas. The compound we were stationed on had a perimiter of about a mile, give or take a bit. And I had a lot of spare time. My unit was scheduled to redeploy back to the US a couple of months after we got to the compound. Some of the people I was stationed there with spent their time on the roof of our building, developing a tan, and in some cases working out with weights, either improvised, or purchased on the local market. I was never really a weight training sort of a guy, so I didn’t get involved in that, and as a geek, a tan has never really been something I’ve chased after. The last time I ‘tanned’ I turned orange. I’m pretty sure I can explain the story somewhere along the line, if people show a serious interest in it, but it’s really a different story.

In any case I, as well as a few other somewhat independent types, took to walking and running around the compund. Walk for a bit, run for a while, walk a block, run for a while, etc. After a wek or so of this, you realize you are running the entire distance around the compound, a couple of weeks later, you’re doing laps. If you’re really dedicated, or just don’t have anything better to do, you run in the morning and the evening.

Of course the army being what it is, can’t quite leave well enough alone. 4 or 5 weeks into people doing this, some 1LT gets the bright idea to hold a ‘race.’ Invitations are posted all over the compound. Oddly enough about 3 days before the event, I spraign an ankle. I’m in a walking splint the day of the race, so I didn’t get to participate. Funny how some things work out that way.

I really didn’t want to race anyway. I think I had taken up the running to try to impress someone, and after a while I realized I wasn’t going to impress them, but I was gaining secondary advantages.

When I was called up for deployment, I think I weighed in at 210. They needed me, and I was able to complete the PT requirements (which I don’t think I could right now) and I lost the 10 or 11 lb they needed me to in order to pass the required limits for my age and height. (They may have done a basic body fat analys as well, I don’t remember.)

When I returned to the US, I weighed in at 180, and people who looked at my ID from when I was deployed generally agreed that I didn’t look like that any more.

Fast forward to today. I weigh more than I did when I was deployed. Actually I weigh more than I did when I started the c25k program. Part of that is the fact that I haven’t really changed my dietary habits much over the past 2 months, so I am probably eating more callories than I need to. Of course part of the weight gain is probably just the normal fluctuations in body weight from day to day, and I think the variation may also be the selection of clothing I wore to the doctor’s office. (not the lightest weight materials, since I rode the motorcycle over.)

That said, my endurance is up segnificantly. So the current program is to take a known distance, one of a few, and start working on improving my run for both distance, and time.

Tonight I walked and ran a 3 mile loop in about 40 min. I’ll do the same loop first thing in the morning, and again tomorrow evening (or night) and I’m aiming for completing the loop in about 38 min or less. I think I can easily cut 2 min off the time overnight. Over the next week I am going to continue doing this and I’m aiming to get down to under 30 min for the loop by the end of the week. That’s a tougher goal, and might not be feasable. We’ll see. I’m then going to add half a mile to the timed distance, which I’m hoping that by Thursday morning of next week I’ll have in under 35 min. At that point I’m going to take a break for a day to prepare for the run on Saturday morning. I may walk Friday night, just to keep my circulation up, but it will be a much shorter distance.

One of the reasons I’m taking this route is that the run I did for 28 min was almost entirely on a flat surface. I did add a short (2 blocks) hilll at the end of the run, but I have no confidence that where the 5k will be run at the end of next week, will be on a level route. Minniapolis has many places where you can run on a level surface for miles if you wish, but in most cases just feet to your left or right you can find a route that is either one long slow rise, or one short steep hill. I don’t know that the route that I am working myself through now demonstrates all of those features, but there are hills, as well as some long flat areas. I can easily come up with alternate routes that have steeper hills, as well as some routes that have long shallow rises.

By the end of the summer, I’m hoping to build my endurance up to run about 5 miles. Who knows, I may hit that objective by the end of July, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t know what my next objective will be. I”ve never been interested in running a marathon, and I don’t think I will take up that challenge. I think it would be a lot better to start with the plan of running 5 miles a day 3 days a week as a long term objective, with 2 or 3 days a week also visiting the Gym. If I get to the point of running 3 hours a week, and working out in the gym 2 or 3 hours a week, I think I’ll be more than happy.

As bad weather kicks in this fall, I will probably be migrating my runs to the gym on a treadmill. My life at the moment is no where near as dull as sitting on a compund in the desert. for 3 months. But I strongly suspect that the health benifits of the routine will be worth it.

C25K is a great program. the ‘Frist day to 5K’ podcasts are a great way to give yourself targets to stick with and a interval training routine to work within. Feel freeto use it, but remember to talk with your doctor before you start any workout routine. I would also advise talking to him or her before you do any significant modification to your workout regine. Rembember that the real reason to do this stuff is to be in better shape, have more fun, and be able to meet and handle chalenges that come your way. It’s work, but you’ll find it’s worth it.

I seem to forget each week that the reason I am doing this is to get better. This week the ‘improvement’ to meet was simply 3 more minutes than I ran last week. This next week it’s just running 2 more minutes. While I won’t call today’s run ‘easy’ by any means, it definately was doable. I might even have been able to complete it yesteday, though I got several other things done yesterday, so I shan’t complain.

Walking out to gegin the run is a bit interesting these days. It’s almost as if a part of me doesn’t want to do this. Oh, I’m not talking about the psychological battle looking at running 28 min, or 30, or trying to complete a 5k run. What I’m talking about is things like as I’m walking out, feeling like something is in my shoe, or in my sock. Maybe some sand, or smething. That said, once I start the music for the run, I don’t have that difficulty.

Since it has been a couple of days since I last ran, Friday evening in fact, I could feel the tightness of my legs as I started. Oh, not the same tightness as not having stretched, more along the lines of muscles realizing that they are going to have to do some work now.

The watch I regularly wear these days has a stopwatch function, though it can be difficult to use at times. Amoung the anoyances are the start/stop button does have a tendency to not start, or stop the stopwatch. The minute display is small and difficult to read, (is that 7, or 8?) but it’s on the watch, so it’s generally available. I chose not to take either a GPS, or a phone with me today, I went back to my simple MP3 Player, loaded up with the one track for week 8, and along with my keys that’s about all I took with me today. It’s not a mater of running light, just that today I decided that I didn’t really need to carry all that much that could confuse what I am doing. After all I’m going out to run, not really test new geek toys.

I had initially picked a turn around point that was about where I turned around last Friday. It’s a good point to turn around once I have my time up to where I want it and can start working on my speed a bit more. But as I was running I had a cood couple of minutes before I would have gotten there, and I looked at my watch and realized that not only did I not need to go that far, but that I was already close to my turnaround time. So where a fork in the trail existed, I turned around and started heading back.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I hate hills. Well, I realize that inthe long term I’m going to have to deal with them, and occasionally running up, and down them is going to happen. I got to about 2 minutes from the end of my run and off to my right was a long gentle sloap. I decided that rather thna run along the flat, and since I was that close to the end of my run, that I could probably handle running up that slope. Adn when I got to the top I realized I still had some time left, and off to my left was even more up-hill, if not nearly as steep. So I went that way till the end of run indicator came up. And my run was done.

Oh, my day is far from over. I’ll be heading to the gym this afternoon for another hour of workout, but I met the objective for this morning, and this week, even if it was longer than I like, so Onward.

Have fun, go run!

Questions is right. Well, I ran today, and I felt a lot better about it while running than on Wednesday, but still working out sore muscles and such from the Tuesday Gym Experience. Going there again tomorrow, thoug I have not heard about pricing, so I may notactually be working with a trainier tomorrow. We’ll see. Then another runon  Sunday. (Monday?)

Worst today was probably the feeling of wanting to have somethingto drink (water) I didn’t have a need to get something to drink (thirsty) but knew that that was in the cards at some point. The conversion from drinking Diet Mt. Dew to non-carbonated, no caffine beverages is taking it’s own time, but is happening.

Hardware problems today. Hardly something unusuall, but it did affect my routine. I didn’t want to be carying around a mic on the headphones today, not that it’s obtrusive or anthing,but the headphones that came with the cell phone have a button on them that switches the headphones from audio playback to ‘phone’ mode headsets. I suppose if you are out at the park, sitting watching the birds and the dogs, that being able to press a button to answer the phone is nice. I’m not really happy with it though. I think one of the problems I may have been having on Wednesday may have been tied to that, as the dial pad was one of the things that I was seeing on the screen andI don’t think that that was a shake managed device, or app. In any case the problem today appears to be related to the headphone adapter for my phone. It appears thatit is not providing a solid contact for the headphones at some level. The headphones would sound really distorted, which I otherwise would have thought of as a problem with the playback codec needing to be reset. In fact I even power cycled the phone to see if that would help. No good. I finally realized that I was hearingdifferent results as I actually moved the headphone plug around with the adapter. So I appear to have a faulty adapter (headphones have been working in other devices, but I won’t entirely rule them out either.) Most anoying was that Buddy Runner was trying to give me status points and i could hear that it was ’saying’ something, but not hear what was being said.

In all I suspect that I would have been better off without the headphones at all. I may even give that a go.

Nope, didn’t complete the run today. Though I think I did better than Wednesday. I’m contemplating repeating this week, or even going back and repeating week 7 again, though I think I completed that week acceptably. I had been thinking that this week was 30 min of running, but it’s only 28. Next week should be 30. It doesn’t seem like a huge step to add 3 minutes of running to what I did last week, but then the conditions are a bit different this week as well, with the workout at the gym.

Oh, well, enough for now. Have to get cleaned up for work, and if I have time, stop in and pick up a pair of shoes and shorts for the gym. Not really interested in wearing the running shorts again, though the style is OK. (I really need to add to my exercise wardrobe.)

Stay safe. Run. (28 days to the 5k!)

The astute reader will probably note that I didn’t blog about running on Monday as my schedule suggests I should have. They will probably also note that today is listed as session 1 for the week, rather than session 2. They are right.

After my drive on Sunday, and return, I slpet fairly late Monday morning, and ended up being awake for about 4 hours in the middle of the day, and another few hours after 8 at night. I don’t think that the miss was a total loss, as the idea of the schedule is to run three times a week, rather than a 3 – 4 – 3 – 4 cycle. I’m going to be a day behind this week, but I’m not too worried about it.

I tried a different application for tracking running this week. A couple of weeks back I ordered an arm band for my G1 and that came in yesterday. I’m going to have to mod it yet, as the headphones that came with the phone are not a good match for the headphone jack on the G1. It appears that it would be a good armband for an iPod touch or possibly an iPhone as well if someone is looking for one. Picked up on eBay for something like 5.00 and 4.99 shipping. I ordered 2. The kit comes with both a neoprene armband as well as a plastic waterproof case with it’s own arm band, and a lanyard for wear around your neck. Nice I suppose if you are going snorkling, as it’s rated for up to 5 meters, but I hadn’t really been planing on taking my phone swimming with me, and I suspect it would not work well as an underwater speakerphone.

One of the objectives was to use buddy runner on my cell phone to track my running session. It’s designed to use the built in GPS and such to keep track of speed and position. I’m a bit bothered by the fact that once you hit ’start’ on applications like this, if it tells you that you need to activate the GPS and cell location system, that it doesn’t recognize that you’ve done that and actually start when you get back to the application. In other words when I got done with my run today I discovered that I did not have a track of my running experience on the phone. Oh well.

Another mod I have to do to the case is punch a hole for the camera. One of the add-in’s on my phone uses the camera to determine the ambient light level, and if it deams the light level as ‘dark’ it dims the backlight on the phone. That kind of makes it hard to read the screen while it’s in the armband. I’m not sure how much tood that will do, as the armband may be holding the camera it self up to my arm, but the neoprene certainly isn’t letting much light in.

The run itself today was a bit worse than last Saturday. I followed the same basic course. The weather was significantly warmer, with relatively high winds. For the most part those winds were cross to my path, and much of my path has tree cover along the sides of the path to act as a wind buffer. The down side is that the wind increased evaporation, and the heat took it’s toll. I didn’t run even as well as I did Saturday, which in my opinion was no great shakes. That said, I think I got further on my way back on my final running attempt than I had on Saturday. Hoping that Friday afternoon’s workout ends up going even better. At the very least, it looks to be cooler.

I’m begining to wonder if it is going to be taking me longer than the 9 weeks the course is designed to get up to the distance and speed I should be going. I certainly don’t think that I’m ‘failing’ the course, as I have seen significant improvements in my endurance and my abilities in other areas. But it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m on ‘track’ for completing in 9 weeks. That said, I should be well on my way, and having registered for a 5k run this summer, I’m going to be working at making it happen by the time of the run.

I’m only 44 (45 a week after the week 9 cutoff) I may not be the 25 year old who takes the c25k experience and turns it into a lifelong career of running marathons, but I’m not quite dead yet either. And I’m working to make this go even better.

Stay safe.

I should have gotten another hour or two of sleep.

Never really a good blog begining when the subject is week 6’s wrapup session for c25k, is it? Not all that much I can do about it though, it’s a rough weekend for me. My niece graduates tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going to be doing a bit over 500 miles of driving to get there and back so that I can be available for SkyWarn on Monday. I won’t mention what I got for my niece for her graduation present, but I had to pick that up this morning, as well as make sure that the car was ready to go (oil change) do a recording of a radio net and helping someone check that they have access to the repeater system as well. I was up after work yesterday until after 11 am today, woke up at just after 3:00 pm and got ready to perform my session.

I could blame the wind, or just being tired. but I don’t know if that’s quite right. In any case it doesn’t really matter why I didn’t get quite as much running done as I would like. I just have to keep at it.

I did get to my turn around point, 12-13 minutes out, but the return was not as well done. I would say that I ran a bit over half the time.

I’m not going to get overly concerned with that unless I don’t see an improvement on Monday morning. It doesn’t matter at this point if I try to ‘re-run’ the session or not, as all of week 7 is the same routine as the final session of week 6. A brisk 5 min walk, followed by a 25 min run. I have great confidence that I will be completing that, and moving on to 28 min, and 30 min sessions the next two weeks. I may not be running a full 5k at that point, but I’ll be able to start from there and start building my speed over the weeks to come.

With all that I have to do this weekend, I really could have used a couple more hours of sleep…

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.

Just loaded up the MP3 player with Friday’s set for the week. I have a little bit more time available to me today than I was thinking.

Somewhat out of plan for this morning was an early morning run. I normally plan on running around noon or very early afternoon on Wednesday, so that I can run either when I get home Friday morning, or before I go to work Friday afternoon, or even Saturday morning should that be the best opportunity.

However this week I have a dental appointment a little before 8 this morning, and I really didn’t want to have to be concerned about how a workout would either effect, or be affected by the recovery from that. So chose to wake up about 5 this morning and get the workout out of the way first thing.

The sky was already lightening up significantly by the time I got out and hit the streets. and I noticed that for the first time my shins were not complaining about the walk. They didn’t complain about the first run either. Today’s routine was a 5 min warmup walk, an 8 min run, 5 min of recovery walking, 8 min of run, and a walkout. The MP3 walkout was about 2 min, though I was further from home than that by about 8 min.

A couple of things concerned me duirng the first run. A bit of carry over from what sleep I got, or what kept me from sleeping well. I woke up about 2 am and had a vary substantial, though not solid bowl movement. I was a bit concerend about the prospect of having the runs today, though other than a second episode about an hour later, it has not continued to be an issue. On the other hand my stomach was not feeling the best either. So during the run I was a bit concerned that I would end up thinking I was passing gas, only to end up with very fowled shorts. That didn’t happen. I was also concerned because on at least a couple of occasions during the run I felt very much like I needed to throw up as well. Fortunately that did not become a significant issue either. Oh, my stomach still does not feel it’s best, but it is significnatly better than when I started.

I don’t know if it’s because of whatever bug I’m fighting off, or if it’s just because this was one of my first times with some fairly long runs in the mix, but for the first time after a run I’m feeling a bit chilly in a way that does not feel purely like I am cooling off from evaporation. I suppose it could also be the cool temp on the walk out, but I think I understand a bit better why runners need a blanket to warm up with at the end of a run.

Over the years when I was in HS, and the Army, all my exercise workouts ended with me going inside towards the end of the cool-down period. I was always fascinated by the fact that while I knew that I perspired while running, the recovery phase almost always included me being heavily coated in sweat.That said, I tend to suspect that the situation I’m dealing with now is the result of this bug dehydrating me, and I now need to address that as well.

When I was in College, one of my ROTC instructors had commented to people that running was not the best way to lose weight. Oh, it was find as part of a program that included other things, such as watching what you eat, and light weight work, but the problem with ‘running’ to lose weight is that more often than not, you replace the fat with an equivalent of muscle. Walking is more often than not going to give you better results for loosing weight. That said, you rarely see long distance runners, and I consider anyone regularly running more than a 400 meter distance to be a long distance runner, as unusually heavy. Part of that is that if you are carrying too much mass, you can’t effectively run long distances. So people who are interested in running more than a couple hundred yards or meters, and do so with some regularity, tend to change other aspects of their routine and diet to accommodated the changes they need to make. I will say that I really haven’t lost a significant amount of weight in the past month, but that may be changing as I will need to make changes along the way myself.

Assuming I don’t mung the data again, the kml will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May06.kml Remember that you can paste that link directly into google maps to see the route I took, or download it and open it in Google Earth to see the details as well.

Stay safe.