Getting started

Well I’d put it off long enough, so tonight I finally got myself down to the treadmills for my first training run for the half marathon in October (with less than 3 months to go!) To be honest I was dreading being completely useless, falling off the machine in a sweaty lump, and finding out just how much fitness I’ve lost since I stopped doing regular Aikido practice a year and half ago…

After a quick look at the ‘Novice’ training programme on the Royal Parks Half website I was aiming to do an ‘Easy run’ on my first outing. Apparently this should be 2 miles @ 12′ 23″ per mile. Well, 23 minutes of running didn’t seem too bad. Here goes!

Uh oh.. the running machines are in kilometres – this was not helpful and I already felt like a dork in the gym. So I did my stretching, set the treadmill to manual and decided to try for 4km and started running. Fool that I am I decided to push myself hard in the first session – just like we usually did in the first Aikido session at the start of term at University. So I started at a very brisk 16km/h for the first kilometre. Whoops! that really got me sweating!! But I made it in one piece and huffed my way down to 10km/h for the rest of my run.

I was quite happy chugging along, but after 3km I was starting to tire and almost fell off the treadmill when I tried to look over to the next machine to see how fast my neighbour was going. I started watching the numbers on the machine way too much and, of course, they clocked up slower and slower. Still, I resolved to finish my first run properly and pushed up to 12km/h for the last 1/2km.

It was a good first outing and I ran 4km in 21 and half minutes (11.6 km/h). Go Josh! Thank God for the automatic cool down setting on the machine. I was in a dizzy half-wit haze afterwards and was glad I didn’t have to go far for a cold shower. Thank you body for doing good )