Like I have said before, I am an incidental runner, didn’t plan to be one but I needed to rattle my thoughts within my brain and be out in the nature which contributed to my running. To this day I hesitate calling myself a runner especially because I am surrounded by co-workers who have run marathons and sneeze 5Ks routinely. I never received any training, never join any running club, never had a steady running partner, all I had was a print out that claimed to take me from couch to 5K in 12 weeks and I thought good for me, at least I am not on the couch….
The first few 5Ks that I did came because I steadily increased my running time and to my surprise one day, the pedometer app on the iPod claimed that I ran 4.8 miles and I thought to myself hurrah… Then came a season when getting out of the house to run wasn’t as easy and I started losing my muscles, sure enough it wasn’t long after that that half an hour of huffing and puffing and my pedometer barely registers two miles. No, it’s not my pedometer that’s broken it’s me; and trust me it took a lot of courage to admit that to myself. When the stomach is hurting and breathes making a constant wheezing sound and the heart is leaping to find a way out of the body, it’s tough to say to yourself that you didn’t try enough or that the body is not strong enough.
Well, coming to the point, after a few episodes like that I knew I needed help and I knew I cannot commit to the confines of a gym routine and I was too hesitant to expose myself to a running club or a running coach. That’s when pod-runner podcast made a re-entry in my life. I say re-entry because I had heard about it a year ago at a beginners running brown-bag that my friend had organized but at that time I was doing okay as a runner and never paid attention to it.
Fast forward to April this year, a few weeks before my first 5K of 2011, I was not as prepared as I wanted to be and was scrambling to put together a playlist of high energy and high beat songs that can carry me through. And out of the blue, I landed on this free exercise podcast again, I downloaded it to my computer and then to my Philips MP3 player that I am now using for my runs cause the iPod touch seems too delicate if it ever slips off my pocket while running and breaks. Besides the podcast I also uploaded some high intensity bollywood songs that ended up saving me during the Susan G Komen 5K as I had mentioned.
After the race I have been diligently working with the pod-runner podcast and since I haven’t yet found a routine that I can stick to, I keep flipping between week 1 music to week 5 music, depending upon how I am feeling that particular moment but the goal is that with this steady and sometimes not so steady practice by Fall sometime I should be able to run 5K at a desirable speed and hopefully graduate to an 8K at an average speed. The podcast is a series of remixed songs and are split into slow beats and fast beats to indicate the walking/running interval. That’s the goal anyways and I like it because even though I can’t run a 5K at a desirable speed I know the 2.5 miles that I ran with intervals is close to my aim. Besides I don’t end up with a pain in my liver and constantly out of breathe instead I slow down before I hit the peak as suggested by the music beats and end up working my leg muscles and not taxing my lungs.
I wanted to document my new efforts and perhaps share it with a newbie runner who is hesitant like me…
