Day 10

Today was dreary and rainy and I ran indoors on the treadmill. I have decided that for many reasons I like running outdoors better – not the least of which is not having to fiddle with the damn treadmill to get the right speed settings. In the outdoors, I just decide I want to run and I run at the pace that feels good. On the treadmill I have to fiddle with numbers and buttons and it just isn’t cool to be reaching and running and trying not to stumble and fall face-first into the display while hoping to catch yourself without bouncing down onto the whirring belt below your feet to be spit humiliatingly out the back. Not that it has happened like that… yet… but it is exactly what goes through my mind every couple of minutes of walk/run intervals when it is time to adjust the speed – AGAIN. I started out strong today and felt good but by the time the 10-minutes of initial walking was over and I was ready to run, my legs were sore and I could barely get comfortably through two or three intervals before my calves cramped up on me so hard that I had to slow down and resort to walking. I only ended up logging 22 minutes. I was pretty … well… pissed, dejected, worried, exhilarated (I got almost a full 120 seconds in on my first running interval) and everything in between. I broke down and admitted I might need more info than what I had found on the Internet and turned to a friend who is a fairly new runner – less than two years – to get some sanity check and pointers. It doesn’t suck that she trained with a “real” trainer for a year and could give me real information that worked for her. I found that 1) I am training way too much if I’m running every day. Cardio everyday, OK but running everyday, not OK. 2) It may not feel like it but I’m going too fast in trying to increase the time I am running at each interval. The fact that in just over a week I have doubled the length of my running intervals is apparently not OK. 3) I’m wasting my best running energy on my initial 10 minutes of walking time. Oh, and I could probably use a masseuse to work out the poor calf muscles but tell me something I didn’t already know on that regard…. So, I am officially on the running only every other day plan and am going to switch it up a bit with warming up on a recumbent bike (I happen to even have an exercise bike at home for the running outdoors days) so I can save my legs for running up front when I get on the treadmill. I have to say, it still feels good to be achy at the end of the day because I had a good run earlier. I just have to stop comparing myself to the marathoner’s and lifetime runners that seem to surround me and realize that I AM doing good runs – for me! – which is the only one it really counts for…