C25K

Ok this is not some weird techno jargon but my latest exercise attempt. The Couch to 5km program on Cool Running.

Now those of you that know me know that exercise and I have never been very close. I admit I toyed with aerobics and swimming a couple of years ago but could always find excuses not to do it or a reason to visit the chip shop afterwards and I never really got the 'feel good' factor that you hear people who love exercise talk about.

So, why take up running? Well I started thinking about it last year while driving back from our visit to Silverstone. We stopped for a snack and magazine refill and not having a Weightwatchers magazine I bought a Womens Fitness magazine that had exercises to help me trim down a bit before the cruise in August. The magazine included a section on starting running by doing intervals of walking and running. As I was already doing some walking after work by taking a long route home I thought that could be doable.

I did the exercises for a while, enjoyed my cruise until my hip and legs got sore with all the walking and when I came home went back to couch potato mode during Autumn and Winter. The freezing ice and snow this Winter was a great excuse to cut back my walking even further.

Then fast forward to this Spring and Eddie Izzard on comic relief running all those marathons and to the other celebs cycling through Scotland in the freezing weather that had kept me tucked up in bed. I started to feel guilty. Then to Spring Harvest this year and on week 3 my two chalet mates were both runners and got up early to run before hitting the rest of the day and they did enjoy it!

I was getting the message :) I started checking out running forums for good ways to start and found a lot referred to this c25K program. Once I found there were podcasts to help with the timing and that I didn't have to break any speed or distance records I decided to give it a go.

So here I am on Week 2 Day 2 having just done my fifth session of walking and running. I do feel better, I am enjoying it, I even ran in the cold and rain last week and felt great after.

I'm updating my status on facebook after each run and will start to log how I'm doing here and hopefully in a couple of months I can say I'm a runner, rather than just runner in training :)