More treadmill

[liv]

I procrastinated so hard on running for a second time this week, ended up leaving it to the last possible opportunity I had if I'm going to manage my planned three runs. Anyway I went back to the gym at lunchtime. I might have got away with running outdoors, and I almost wish I had, as it's gloriously sunny. But sunny at this time of year doesn't mean warm, and I've been having such a hard time running in the cold air recently I decided to play it safe.

This felt a lot better than Monday. Not a big jump up in the numbers; instead of 5 minutes at 7 kph, 5 minutes at 6.5 kph and then a walking break, I did 7.5 minutes at 7 kph and 15 minutes at 6.5 kph, then walked until my breathing was more or less regular and ran the last little bit at pace. Still only 3.3 km total, but this time I felt like it was hard because I'm still somewhat out of shape, rather than hard because breathing deeply hurts my lungs. I'm getting back to the stage where 6.5 kph feels gentle, though perhaps not quite slow enough to fully recover from running faster than that.

Thursday run!

[rmc28]

I ran on a Thursday lunchtime, woo hoo!

I also had my first taste of Zombies, Run! which I mostly enjoyed. 

The format is story section / track from selected playlist / story section, and that all worked fine.  There were also some additional instructions at times in a robotic voice that seemed to speak only in one ear, and which I really struggled to understand.  Sometimes it was referring to the "Zombie chase" interval training and sometimes it seemed to be counting off my pace, but I really couldn't follow it and ended up ignoring it.  Since getting back, I've found and increased a "game volume" option on the app, so I hope that'll be clearer next time.

I was a bit unsure at the beginning, which jumped straight into the story and I wasn't sure if I should be running or walking.  I decided to follow my usual route, and in the absence of any other cues, start running around the point I normally do after a 5-minute warm-up.  Just as I reached that point, the story was urging me to run, run now, which seemed fairly clear!

The end of the story also seemed to signal "you're safe now and can stop running", and then played me another track to cool down to.  There were some indistinct robot instructions during this track, so maybe that'll be clearer next time.

The running activities do seem to post to RunKeeper, but seem to only show up on the Activities tab on the website, not on the dashboard one initially goes to, nor on the app.


I keep saying next time, because I enjoyed this enough to try it again and work through more of the story, and it makes a fun change from radio 4 podcasts.  I'll probably stick to using it on my weekday "short" runs on the half-hour setting and use my weekend run to focus on distance rather than time.  (unless and until my weekend run starts taking me an hour of running, which it won't for a while)