A huge win for me

darkrider42 · November 2010

I hate to toot my own horn, but this is something I just can't keep to myself. I'm still a pretty big guy at 6'-3" and around 290lbs so this wasn't an easy feat for me, but today I ran a full 60 minutes at pretty close to my normal pace ... without any walking breaks. I even still had a little kick left at the end. My total distance was 5.1 miles. The furthest I've run continuously recently is maybe* 3.5. In fact, I hadn't run that long or far since I was about 19-20 yrs old! For the last week or so, I've been doing my usual 3 miles and then filling out the hour with brisk walking or another short running interval. But today I was determined. It sort of surprised me that it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one though. Although I still felt pretty good after 5-10 minutes, the thought of still having to run for 50 more* minutes was daunting. I had to talk myself off the ledge and calm myself down. I kept telling myself "Just get to the xx:00 mark...you can do that, no problem!" It took until about the 50:00 mark before I really started to believe I could make it..and about 6-7 more minutes until I was certain. What a rush I felt seeing the time roll to 60:00 and the treadmill started slowing down for the cooldown!

I'm not ready to make this my normal, daily effort, but I'm going to continue working out hard on the treadmill for 60 minutes at a shot so hopefully soon, this will seem easy.

soze · November 2010

That is most worthy of a toot. WTG!

gnastro · November 2010

Congratulations it is a big accomplishment!

michlingle · November 2010

Running is VERY mental, nice work!!!

skylersnanna · November 2010

Thats awesome, keep up the great work :bigsmile:

MontanaB · November 2010

thats great!!! well done - one day soon il hopefully be able to run for 10mins and then go up from there - my running ability is zilch atm!!!

darkrider42 · November 2010

THANKS everyone! I'm still floating on endorphins.

MontanaB - You sure will get there!! When I started from scratch, I (unknowingly) did a sort of modified Couch-to-5K program. I'd run 1 minute, then walk 2 or 3 minutes, however long it took to recover and be able to run another 1 minute. I'd repeat that for 30 minutes. When I felt ready sometimes a couple days, sometimes a week or two, I'd bump it and run 2 minutes, walk 2 or 3 minutes. Then when I was ready, I'd R3 & W2, R4 & W2, etc. I'd let my body ... specifically my lungs & leg muscles, heh ... tell me when it was time to increase or stay right where I was. The thing is to get your body used to moving for 30 minutes.

I completely understand if running even 1 minute doesn't seem possible yet. Even though my starting weight here was 295, a few months before that when I started exercising again, I weighed around 345. I had to start with nothing but walking for 30 minutes for a couple weeks before adding in any running. But if I can do it, so can you. If you'd like to find out more about the Couch to 5K program, check out www.c25k.com. But personally, I liked my version better where I listened to my body and let it tell me what it was ready for. I'm going to use this same approach in training for my first 10K in 30 some years...even though I just learned recently there's a Bridge-to-10K program available too.