liv: oil painting of seated nude with her back to the viewer (body)
Liv ([personal profile] liv) wrote in [community profile] c25k2018-06-25 08:22 pm

Zombies Run 5K week 2

I had a hard time motivating myself to go out in this heatwave, and I thought, some novelty might help. So I had a go at a workout from week 2 of Zombies Run 5 K training.

Zom25K is structured very differently from the C25K programmes I'm used to (mostly the NHS one but others I've seen are roughly similar). Instead of a steady progression of 1 minute, 90 seconds, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, it goes from 15 second intervals to 30 second intervals to... 5 minutes??? I've been doing 6 x 90 second intervals as fast as I can push myself, so changing to 5 x 30 seconds felt like a big step down. Especially since the app recommends that you run these intervals slowly; I feel that I am not going to build up my fitness meaningfully by running slowly for 30 seconds, so I ran as fast as I could bear to in the heat.

The other thing that's different about Zom25K is that in the early weeks it suggests you finish out the workout with a long 'freeform' segment where you can choose your own balance of running and walking. I think I would have had a really hard time with that if I were a complete beginner to running, but in this case I jogged slowly for 5 minutes, walked for 3 minutes and ran a bit faster for the last two minutes.

My total distance over 30 minutes was 3 km; I wasn't really expecting an amazing pace when it was boiling hot and I spent less than 10 minutes of the workout actually running. So I think that was a useful workout, but I am probably going to go back to the more conventional programme, possibly with the normal Zombies game later on when the runs get long enough to be boring.
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)

[personal profile] rmc28 2018-06-26 08:58 am (UTC)(link)
Well done for getting out in the heat!

The other thing I found a bit frustrating about Zom25K is that the workouts get increasingly longer, up to an hour, which is quite hard to wedge in three of those each week.