Finally!

Today I ran for the first time in far too long!  I’ve been on winter break for the week and kept telling myself I had to do it while I actually had the time.  Wednesday I spent the morning at appointments, and by the time I got home, had lost my motivation.  Yesterday, I slept in and then made the excuse that I wouldn’t have time before I had to get ready for a lunch date (such a lie).  Finally today, I got all the motivation I needed at the OB/GYN.  My doctor was doing the typical exam and kept making comments about how healthy I was (taking into account things like my height and weight, muscle tone, etc). All I could think was how much of a lie that was considering not only my recent eating habits, but my activity level.  I used to run daily and now the most running I do each week is at our Saturday football game.  I knew that if I didn’t want to feel like a fraud the next time I saw her, I had to make a change.  So I did…

I knew I needed to start out easy since this was my first run in so long, but I also wanted to push myself.  I remembered seeing an interval workout on SarahFit.com months ago.  After a few minutes searching her site, I found it.  I decided it’d be a nice challenge because it included five, 5-minute cycles of “fast running, steady jogging, and slow jogging” followed by 2 minutes of walking.  Let me tell you, Sarah wasn’t lying when she said you’d be praying for the fifth interval to end.  The first one or two intervals of each five minute interval were challenging, but by the last interval before the break, I was always counting down the seconds until I could walk!  It was intense! It probably didn’t help that many of the short 10-second sprint portions just happened to be UP inclines! 

In 45 minutes, including a 5 minute warm-up and 5 minute cool-down, I covered exactly 4.5 miles.  The “run” portion included 4 minutes, 10 seconds of sprinting, 8 minutes, 20 seconds of steady jogging, and 12 minutes, 30 seconds of slow jogging.   It also included 10 minutes of walk breaks.  Not a bad distance to cover when you look at the breakdown, and definitely a good workout to break back into the sport.  I am looking forward to doing it again soon.  Just going to make sure I plan the route better so I don’t spend the 10 second sprints on inclines again!