Running

I used to run pretty regularly and use it to get in shape. Well I started hanging out more with family and got a lot more lazy and stopped doing it. So now I’m back into running again. I’m trying to run every day and at a bare minimum, at least three times a week. So this week, I ran Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I got to Thursday and had dropped Zach off an hour away with his dad and Jolyn came with me (:D) and I tried calling April and one way or the other, by the time I got home, I was ready to just chill out on the couch and not do anything. The problem was there wasn’t really anything worthwhile on TV – so annoying. I’m trying to veg and I can’t even do it properly.

So I was looking at my pedometer, trying to justify taking a day off from running. Well I aim to get in about 10,000 steps a day and yesterday by 8:30 pm, I only had 4,700. I recently got a better parking spot at work so it’s cut down my walk by about ½ mile each way so that really cuts into my daily steps. So I decided that I would just walk on the treadmill to up my step count but still take it easy. So I got on the treadmill and was walking at a pace of 3 miles an hour. Ok after three minutes of that, I was just bored. I normally do a two to three minute warm up and then jog for a minute and then walk for 1 ½ minutes and repeat that cycle for 20 more minutes. So I’m 5 minutes into this attempt at walking and finally decide to just start running. I took it easy and was jogging at a 12-minute mile pace and after one minute of it, just decided to keep going. So I jogged a mile in 12 minutes. Which I haven’t done in more than a year.

I’ve decided that for my next 5K I want to do it in under 30 minutes. So I’ve been tracking my time this week with my jog/walk routine (and with that, I jog at a 10-minute mile pace) and two days this week, I’ve gotten my mile under 13 minutes even with the walking mixed in (which is done at about a 15 to 17-minute mile pace.) So it’s kinda funny that I was actually running at a slower pace last night than I normally do but I still got where I wanted to go faster.

Just goes to show that we push ourselves and push ourselves but sometimes, the best thing we can do is just pull back a tad and take a breather and give ourselves a break.