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I shouldn’t call it punishment, but sometimes it feels like it. I’m doing Couch to 5k.

I finished my third week on Saturday and I’m honestly kind of surprised that I’ve made it this far. The first few days I thought for sure that I would die, but I can actually feel myself getting stronger bit by bit. And I’ve been really pushing myself to finish the jogging intervals no matter what.

I’ve never jogged as regular activity. When I was a ballet dancer, it was generally discouraged because of the risk of shin splints and the different muscle use (read: your thighs might get too big). So, learning to jog is very humbling. And I think it’s really making me recognize that, while I’m not old, I’m definitely not as young as I used to be. I feel pretty certain that if I had decided to take up jogging, say, five years ago, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Now, my knees hurt and my breathing sucks. The 30ish pounds that I’ve put on since I started grad school and my main physical activity became typing and freaking the hell out* dance gloriously around my mid-section as I start to resemble Fred Sanford during one of his claims of The Big One.

The game has changed for me. I was very in shape from ballet when I was younger and retained a lot of that through a good portion of my 20s. Picking up a physical activity wasn’t A Thing. Now it is.

I had actually been toying with the idea of doing the Couch to 5k for a number of years after a friend on LiveJournal mentioned it. And I made an attempt last year which resulted in me deciding that I don’t like treadmills for much the same reason that I was terrified of escalators when I was little. I mean, I don’t REALLY believe that the treadmill is going to eat me, unlike that automatic foot-eating monster in Gimbel’s that forced my mom to go the long way to find a safe and non-hungry-for-tiny-toes elevator. But the speed that I had to go to run was just slightly too fast and remember one time thinking, “I really should have put that emergency clip thing on my shirt. This could end poorly.” Plus, the first few weeks of C25K have a lot of switching back and forth between running and walking, and that made for a lot of button pressing while hyperventilating, running, and trying not to fly off the treadmill and into the bench weights.

I’m not doing much in the way of calorie restriction or anything. Just eating healthy foods when I’m hungry and trying not to snack too much. A few people have told me I’m looking good and I’m just going with that for now. My scale has dust on it.

I’ll start week four hopefully tomorrow. I was going to start it today but we went roller skating on Saturday and I have a monster blister on the bottom of my foot. Sexy.

*By the way, my school was just ranked the 8th most stressful school in the country by the Daily Beast, which isn’t exactly The Source on such matters, but whatever, it’s documentation that I slayed that particular dragon and/or am certifiable for attempting such a thing.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 2:19 pm and is filed under dumb shit that i do, life n'at, the state of things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.