Half an hour AGAIN

[jack]

I went back to the gym and did another half an hour: 5 minutes warming up, then alternating jogging at 7.8 and walking at 5.3, but this time I jogged for 70 seconds, and then walked for 50. This was definitely harder than last time, but also fell within what I was capable of, so I felt really chuffed to have improved it a little. I'm excited to see if I can eventually reach the point Liv's got to of running continually!

Comments

[liv]

Ooh, hello, you joined in with posting your progress. Yay for gradually improving!

Even if you don't want to follow the C25K programme precisely, I strongly suggest keeping the recovery times the same or even increasing them as you increase the running times. Because otherwise you soon won't have time to recover at all. I know my recovery times are longer than average because of asthma, but I think you're not going to get much benefit from walking for like 20 seconds or 10 seconds. Which would mean that you'd be trying to move from very short intervals such as 90 seconds to essentially continuous running really quickly, and I'm not sure that's going to be feasible.

[jack]

Hello! *hugs* Thank you!

Yes, I don't think I'll post everything here, but I wanted to write longer than I can manage at fitocracy, but thought most people who weren't also working on improving their gym-ing probably wouldn't find it really very interesting if I posted it on DW.

Oh, hm. OK, I must be able to work this out. If you want to increase the proportion of 30 min you spend running, is one 60s break every four minutes better than one 30s break every two minutes?

[rmc28]

This is why I like c25k for having done all the thinking for me :-)

Welcome! I look forward to seeing your progress.

[liv]

The thing is, you want to increase the proportion of time you spend running, but you also want to increase the total amount of time you can run continuously without a break. You can certainly increase the proportion from 1:1 to 3:2, maybe even to 3:1. But supposing you get to the point where you can run for 90 secs with only 30 second breaks, then what? You can't just suddenly jump up from 90 seconds to 30 minutes. Or even from 110 seconds to 30 minutes, if in fact it turns out that people with less rubbish lungs than me can recover in just 10 seconds.

So maybe one option is to try 30 seconds break in 2 minutes, and when you can do that, 1 minute break in 4 minutes is the next step up? The proportion's the same, obviously, but you're also improving the amount of continuous running you can do, and believe me, it'll be a lot harder! For my part, one of the reasons I've found C25K useful was because it promised, and delivered, increments which were challenging but manageable; I don't think I could have figured it out for myself, really.

One piece of advice I've read is that you shouldn't try to increase much more than 10% at a time. The difficulty in interpreting that is, 10% of what? Clearly when C25K tells you to suddenly jump up from 2 x 8 minutes to 20 minutes, that's more than a 10% increase! Except that in total time it isn't, if you count it as 8+5+8 versus 20.