Week Eight, day one - after 10 days without running!

I believe I mentioned how shit the weather has been in my previous post. Well, today I woke up on my last week day of vacation (stay-cation) and the sun was shining brightly, the sky was blue, it wasn't windy, and there were no signs of rain. So I had to. I had to use today to go out and run outside and get back into the program.

The last time I ran was crap - it was week seven, day three, but I didn't do the whole thing. I've been a bit sick over the past week, I've been eating, drinking, and smoking more than than usual, AND just to make things even more fun I got my period. But I figured, well, might as well try to stick to the couch-to-5k schedule and just press ahead with week eight. Today called for:

5 minutes warmup walk
28 minutes non-stop running
5 minutes cooldown walk

People. I did the FULL TWENTY EIGHT MINUTES. I'm in shock. That's 3 minutes longer than my longest outside run, and my last 25-minute non-stop run was... two weeks ago? something like that.

I can't claim that I enjoyed all 28 minutes. When I had about 7 minutes left of the run, I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop with 5 minutes left. 4 minutes. and those last three minutes, I REALLY wanted to stop. but I kept going. and holy god, when I was done, it was hard to get my breathing back on track and start feeling normal again. I did the cooldown walk slowly and paused to stretch here and there. Walking up the stairs to my apartment felt like climbing a mountain. I couldn't tell my boyfriend about the run until after a glass of water and a few minutes of sitting down.

But still! I ran freakin' 28 minutes! That means I have two more minutes to add before I reach my goal. I'm still really skeptical that I'll be able to pull this off on a treadmill... even running through a beautiful city with new scenery and my own music bores me, I can't fathom staying on a treadmill for 35-40 minutes. I want to try because seriously, the weather in Amsterdam is only going to get worse in Jan/Feb. I was lucky with the late autumn.

So I'm going to be late with my goal, but goddammit, I'm going to get there. and maybe one day I'll even like running.