My Plan

Right now, my workouts consist of 21-23 minutes of moving on my treadmill. Why that random amount of time? Because that is how long episodes of my favorite sitcoms are without the commercials. :) I run while watching my favorite episodes of Friends, Scrubs, Big Bang Theory, and others. That helps me to not focus so much on the time and distance remaining before I meet my goal. It has helped a lot.

The first week, I walked at a fast pace and when that started to feel more natural, I upped the incline to make the workout more intense.

The second week I started a slow jog at the beginning of the workout, and alternated that with my fast walk.

The third week, I pushed it up a bunch of nothces because my asthma was feeling much more controlled. I started with jogging, and went a full mile before letting myself walk. Then, while walking, I would work out my arms by doing the movements from the Kenpo-X video from P90-X.

I have kept that same routine for this fourth week as well. I punch up the mile speed every day just a bit. Sometimes I have to put it back to where I was the day before by the end of the mile. Last night I ran it at 5.6 miles an hour. I know that sounds slow- but I was pretty proud of myself. Tonight I will try it at 5.7.

When I get to a comfortable 10 minute mile (6 mph), I will start trying to run straight for 1.25 miles, and go from there.

Since starting this goal, I have lost 4 pounds. That seems lame to me because I have been working so hard. The bright spot for me is that this running is getting easier. It feels better than it did before, and I actually look forward to my 22 minutes of what felt like torture a few weeks ago. That is awesome.

I have only missed running 5 of the 28 days of this year. The first 3 I missed were because I was down with a wicked case of Mastitus. The other 2 were while I was on a mini-vacation with my family. I didn't run those days, but I did do laps in the hotel pool, and I felt that workout like crazy.

My husband says he can already see a difference. I don't know about that as I can't see a difference, but I have always been hard to pick up on subtle changes like that in myself (which is how I let myself get to this point without stopping it before now).

I think, to keep myself from hating myself and the inventor of scales, I will only weigh myself once a week. That should keep me from stressing over the daily ups and downs that the body naturally goes through. Maybe I will end up throwing the scale away all-together. We will see.

I also think I will post daily about my workouts, but I will keep it to one post a week. That means I will just put daily updates on the post for the week. I think that should be sufficient. I know it will be boring to read, but as I looked through the work-out histories my friends posted on their blogs, I thought how proud they must feel to scroll through all those days and see how hard they had been working. I think it is an awesome inspirational and motivational method.