Week 6 Day 3

Holy Kryptonite!  The exercise for this day is a 25-minute jog, with 5-minute warmup/cooldown walks.  I elected to do my workout right after getting home.  This had been hanging over my head for a couple of days now - eating dinner and sitting there while it settled was not appealing.  I wore Tami's special gift (link) for the occasion.

I popped Rush R30 into the DVD player, and started wiggling at 3.3 mph, 1% incline.  No need to program the treadmill this time.  At the end of the walk my heart rate was up to 112.  I was going to cover up the clock, but decided not to.  I got to 10 minutes pretty easy, with a heart rate at 162, but it seemed that 15 more minutes was asking a lot.  At 12.5 minutes, my heart rate was 165.  My legs weren't dying, and my breathing wasn't too awful, so I kept going.

At 17.5 minutes, I thought about my 20-minute jog at the end of Week 5.  I certainly wasn't going to stop before 20 minutes.  I think that's when my brain started shutting down non-essential functions.  I pretty much ignored the DVD, even though it was my favorite band of all time playing.  It felt good to pass 20 minutes - I was in virgin territory.  At around 22 minutes, I thought about where I would place my hands on the rails to let the belt spin a few times with my feet off to the side.  By now my heart rate had climbed to 175.  I told myself - oh, it's just a 3-minute jog, I can do those in my sleep.  When I had two minutes remaining, I knew I would make it to the finish line.  And I did! (4.5 mph and 1% incline the whole way.) My heart rate never got higher than 175.

I walked a few extra minutes after the 5-minute cooldown, happy in the knowledge that I had made it.  I burned around 400 calories.  The stretching and calf massage went fine and I'm really pleased at how my legs have adapted.  I could breathe good enough the whole time.  Now, I'm thinking about a couple of other areas: improving my cardio so I can do this amount of work at a lower heart rate and the mental side of things (maybe outdoors wouldn't be so bad if I can find a relatively level run). During the jog, I figure I had about 4,000 foot falls - didn't heel strike a single one of them.  One consolation of this routine, is that it doesn't get any more demanding in Week 7.