Couch to 5K

I think we all like to believe that we’re in good health, eat well and are reasonably fit. In a similar vein, our kids like to believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen the hashtag #C25K popping up in my twitter stream, but I only recently decided to investigate what it meant. Turns out that quite a few of the people I follow had begun the Couch to 5k running program. C25K is an interval training program and although that’s hardly a new concept, its popularity has meant that a bunch of helpful resources have been created to assist you to get off the couch.

This morning I downloaded a music mix that was designed to accompany the C25K program, with the beat changing up or down according to whether you should be jogging or running, from Podrunner Intervals and loaded it onto my iPod, found my barely used pair of sneakers and headed out the door. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the first transition from a brisk walk to a jog felt like it was going to make my lungs explode, but by the time I reached the cooldown part of the workout I was actually disappointed that I had no more jogging sections to come.

Three times a week for the next 9 weeks I’ll be following the C25K program, if all goes to plan I’ll be able to do a 5K run in 30 minutes, which seems like quite a feat at this point in time. The concept of ‘getting fit’ always seems rather nebulous to me, the beauty of C25K is that there’s a well defined goal and an obvious way to get there.

Update: Second session finished. Buster Boy woke me up just after 6 and I se out with all of the other nutters. Part way through I started to worry that my usually dormant asthma was about to make a comeback, but it turns out it was mostly my under-developed lung capacity that was causing the problem.