I’ve hit ‘pay now’ and so I might as well admit it on here, since my unwillingness to spend money will make me see this thing through: I’ve just bought some trainers for running. I plan to follow the famous Couch-to-5K training plan which is reputed to get you fit no matter what. I don’t know how unfit or not I am so I’ll trust the article’s suggestion to go pretty easy.

Why am I doing this? Well, atm the only exercise I get is walking very quickly around Oxford. Despite doing this about four or five times a day for anything from ten to twenty minutes, it’s not much, and so for general health and fitness I should do more. Why do I suddenly care about being fit through exercise? Aside from being a Good Thing in the long term, in the more immediate future I would like more mental and physical energy. This is not the solution to all my current issues but perhaps it will help. And why running? Because I like being up and about very early in the morning and I don’t like the idea of a man-made gym, and I have no interest in actual sports.

Shoe-buying was a bit of a minefield. I have never owned any trainers, and a shop assistant assured me the only solution was shoes priced above £100, which is obviously ridiculous. The Internet to the rescue, having me wet my feet. I am still rather unsure because it’s hard to judge how likely one is to destroy one’s knees by wearing cheap shoes (I bought some priced at £40 ‘reduced’ to £20) with lots of conflicting information out there. So we’ll see; if this goes well I can upgrade.

I have never liked running. I always used to be one of the last to finish in PE fitness tests at school [but at least I finished and I didn’t give up!).
 
Last year, I took up Jogging, got a jogging partner and started training for the Manchester 10km run.
 
I, erm, may have procrastinated most of the training and ended up only doing 3 sessions. In the end, I completed the 10 run in 1hour 10 mins, without dropping to a walk at any point. The biggest difficulty was learning not to run faster than was comfortable.
 
I still hate running (sailing is waaay more exciting, even with cycling, downhill is fun!), but it’s a lot more achievable than one’s sensible side suggests. :)

Comment by td Wed 27 Apr 2011 19:50:57 UTC
how’s this going?
Comment by edward.jacobs Sun 29 May 2011 02:43:16 UTC