Fat Girl Running

Hey everyone! I am back for now because I finally have something to say. First, I'm going to blog about my whole fitness thing because it keeps me accountable if I think people are paying attention. Second, we are going to Basel, Switzerland, and I want to keep you all in the loop with our doings while we're there! So, back to blogging for me.

For those of you not in the know, my cardiologist pronounced my peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) officially healed in April. I am not off the hook yet -- he would like to see one more normal echo before taking me off certain restrictions, but he did approve me to do more than light exercise. I will be seeing him again next year after an echo. He promised that if the echo was normal, I will not need to see him again unless I have some problem or future echos are wonky. I will have to get an annual echo for a while, though.

After discussing a few fitness plans with my cardiologist (he nixed the fitness bootcamp and anything requiring push ups or weightlifting), I settled on doing the Couch to 5K plan from the Cool Running web site. After 3 years of inactivity, doing something promising to gently take me from couch potato to 5K runner sounded pretty good. Also, it's inexpensive -- it only requires shoes and some flat running ground. So I started it up 3 weeks ago.

The first week alternated 60 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes. That gave me about 8 minutes of actual jogging out of the 20 minutes. (I also do a 5 minute warm up walk and a 5 minute cool down walk, which brings my total exercise time up to 30 minutes). It went okay, but it was kind of hard to get into a natural run.

The second week alternated 90 seconds of jogging and 2 minutes of walking. That bumped me up to about 9 minutes of running. That week was hard because I started to get shin splints and this incredible knee pain like I never had before. After a couple of days limping around in pain, Jim convinced me that it would be worthwhile to stop in at Marathon Sports and have them fit me for the right running shoes. I was skeptical, but the pain drove me to go there. It turns out that my wonderful bargain Asics from the outlets were completely wrong for my pronation problem. You see, I had read that Asics were considered the best shoe for my problem, but didn't understand that I needed to buy a specific STYLE. I just assumed they were all the same. Anyway...they fit me with some "extreme support" Asics and the difference was immediately noticeable.

The third week switched up the routine to 90 seconds jogging, 90 walking, 3 minutes jogging, 3 minutes walking (repeated twice), for a total of 9 minutes jogging. I was ridiculously scared of running for 3 minutes, but it turned out to be okay.

That bring us to today -- Week 4, Day 1: 3 minutes seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking, 5 minutes jogging, 2.5 minutes walking (2 reps) for a total of 16 minutes of jogging. Yikes!! I dreaded this run, but it was also fine. My legs didn't hurt at all during or after the run, although they did feel pretty tired during the last 5 minute jog.

So, yeah, I'm running and sticking to the program. Next week, I'll be half way through. I'm actually curious to see if I can make it through the 9 week program without having to repeat a week, which is what you have to do if you find one of the workouts too tough. I thought this week would be too hard, but it wasn't, so maybe this will actually work!

P.S. I'm still knitting -- one pair of socks a month plus whatever else amuses me. I'll have to do a photo montage the next time I post.