My Couch to 5K Experience

So, I wanted to update you on what’s been going on with me.  As some of you know, I accepted a writing position with the Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans website and I’ve had a couple of articles published there. It is very exciting and I have gotten a lot of really positive feedback, which is so tremendous to me.

Really the motivation for me to write about my weight loss journey in so public a forum was two-fold. First of all, and probably most obviously – I’ve got potentially a couple (few?) thousand people reading my story and cheering me on – which is wonderful but at the same time – I must produce results for them. They are counting on me – which brings me to main reason number two for publicizing those humiliating photos, and my weight and my measurements for a couple of thousand folks to read and that is if I touch one person, and they see a little of themselves in me and realize that they want what I’m getting – then I’m happy and it was ALL worth it. And I’ve had that – I’ve had many, many people tell me that I’ve motivated them to get back into exercise programs. It makes me feel tremendous!!!

While reading the Sisterhood blog I ran across one of their new writers who was talking about the Couch to 5K running program. I’ve been hearing about it a lot on Twitter, most specifically from Genevieve Gorder from HGTV!  She’s doing it and is seemingly really happy with it. So I looked up what it was about and it sounded like something I could do. I’ve been using my Wii Fit and other exercise “games” fairly regularly for the last couple of months and have really wanted to start running again, so I decided to give it a try. There are podcasts that you download and the nice man tells you to start walking and he plays some funky music with a beat you’re supposed to follow and he says, “okay time to warm up” and stuff like that.

The first week you briskly walk 5 minutes then you begin your 60 second jog with 90 seconds of brisk walking cycle, which repeats 8 times, then the cool down walk. The podcast is 29 minutes, but I think the walking/jogging part was 20 or so…

Well, let me tell you how I did. First of all, I stayed very close to home – there is A LOT of me jiggling around and I wanted to keep that fairly private. I stayed on my cul-de-sac and the next one over and just keep doing loops. There is a slight grade and while jogging up the grade on my first jog I felt a little twinge under my left patella that kept me kind of limping through it and the next couple. But after that I adjusted so that the run part was always on the downgrade. Thankfully, I didn’t give up because it went away and the rest of the time I felt okay.

I will tell you that I WAS a couch potato – I would get out of bed and walk to the living room and spend all day on the couch – be it working or reading or trolling the blogs, what have you. I had recently become very sedentary. So in the whole Couch to 5K scenario – I seriously was the couch. While I was running (okay jogging), I remember thinking that it was hard. At one point I was sucking serious wind and the man voice came on and said that I should feel good and not tired or winded. Seriously? This is COUCH to 5K – any jogging is going to wind you when you’ve not exercised in a while. I think he was being a little unrealistic and air quoting the word couch and I wasn’t…

Anyway, I finished the first week outside, but was having some twinges below my left kneecap and was a little concerned, so I took it inside to the treadmill and found that it worked really well for week two. As of today I have finished all of week three and honestly couldn’t believe how easy it was! I ran for three minutes straight and could have kept going!

If any of you are “used to be” runners, like I was, this is a really good program to get yourself back in the game!!!