Couch To 5K - The Long Route

[la_fouinard]

Hi All

I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading people’s stories for encouragement so I thought I’d stick up one of my own.

Prior to COVID I was swimming 1500m 3 times a week with a walk of around 2 miles for the other days. In other words I was pretty fit. So you’d have thought 9 weeks to get to running 30 minutes would be easy: and you’d have been wrong like me.

As it turned out it took me nearly 6 months to get to running 30 minutes non-stop. This was due to combination of being over-zealous initially and finding that my shins needed more gradual work up than the program allowed. There were a number of things I found our along the way which helped me enormously which I’m posting in the hope it might be useful to other people.

- The leap from 9 minutes running in Wk3 to 16 minutes in Wk4 caused mild shin splints for me causing me to have to stop for a week. If I’d known I’d have done a Wk3.5 halfway between the two

- For Week 6 I actually found the stopping and starting caused me more problems (and put me back another week) so I went for 5 mins walk and 20 minutes run which was so much better for me

- I ended up repeating Wk7 and Wk8 about 3-4 times each. Basically once I hit 20 minutes running without stopping I added a minute a week and that helped my shins get used to it. Since getting to 30 mins I’ve found that increasing by about a minute or 1/6 mile maximum every 2-3 weeks stops me getting shin splints.

- It’s been posted elsewhere for many reasons but slowing down a bit helped me. Turns out if I push too hard in the first 10 mins I seem to get a lactic acid buildup and end up dry heaving. After a few weeks trying to figure what on earth was going on I found starting off slow and speeding up after 10 mins was all I needed to do

After 6 months I’m now running 5K in around 30 minutes, sometimes faster and sometimes slower. Building up more gradually than the programme gave me time to iron out the individual issues my body had with running and find what worked for me.

If nothing else this shows that even a pretty fit 38 year old can struggle with this programme and need (lots) of extra time to get to 5K. My mentality had always been that I was aiming to run 3 times a week with 5K as a secondary objective.

I’m now aiming for 10K once a week but I’m going to keep it nice and slow so I’m not planning to achieve this until June/July. I am going to keep running every week though and that was my main objective from the programme.

Good luck everyone still working on it and don’t feel discouraged if it takes you longer than you hope.

[John_W Graduate Ambassador]

" if I push too hard in the first 10 mins I seem to get a lactic acid buildup and end up dry heaving. "

WOW! Just how fast were you going? That sounds like you were nearly sprinting. As you've now discovered, slow is the name of the game. Jogging not running!

Keeping the effort , as measured by your breathing, nice, easy and relaxed, at a pace where you can comfortably talk at.

[la_fouinard Graduate in reply to John_W]

Definitely. Very easy to say and sometimes very hard to force yourself to do.

Oddly I’d read up on the first 10 minutes stuff and just treated it as a ‘you just have to bear with it’ after doing so. The forcibly slowing down for 10 minutes made the difference and I’m now frequently faster in my 2nd mile than my 1st.

[IannodaTruffe Mentor]

Many congratulations on your graduation, fellow runner.

The first few minutes of a run is known as the Toxic Ten and is explained here

healthunlocked.com/couchto5...

This guide to post C25k running may be helpful healthunlocked.com/couchto5...

Keep running, keep smiling.

[Newbie59 Graduate]

You got here in the end, that's what matters! and to keep on running of course