c25k | Entries tagged with apps:zombies run

My son's enthusiasm did not last, or at least, every time since then I've offered to take him running, he's refused.

I've admitted to myself that any pretence of a regular running habit has pretty much disappeared from my life recently, and realised this is partly because I'm nervous about overextending myself and triggering a migraine. This is particularly unhelpful because regular running is good for managing my other major trigger (stress) as well as general fitness. Rebuilding the habit is one of the most helpful things I can do for myself right now, and I need to get past being scared.

I know I can do c25k week 1 workouts without overextending, and that when I did this the first time, I found the progression between weeks worked just fine. So I'm just going for a straight go at c25k, repeating weeks if necessary, but fundamentally getting back in the habit of running 3 times a week - two work lunchtimes and once at the weekend.

Today's run was as straightforward as I'd hoped, and I tested out whether I could use Get Running alongside Zombies Run, and they seemed to play nicely together. Next run: Monday.

(I'm going to try, as much as possible, to stick to the same days each week while rebuilding this habit: Monday + Thursday lunchtime, Saturday late-morning when my spouse is up and able to watch the children.)

liv

Didn't manage to run at the weekend; life happened in a fairly dramatic way. Now the clocks have gone back I'm unlikely to be able to run during daylight in the week, which is a bit of a sad thought, but anyway. Today I was good and went to the gym and set the treadmill to my goal pace of 7.5 kph and just kept going. I can tell that I'm pushing closer to the limit of what I can do, but I'm not at the limit.

I did my notional 5 km in 40 minutes, and my legs were starting to feel a bit jelly-ish by the end but my breathing and heart were fine. I think it's time to start C25K again with faster intervals so that I can pick up speed.

Oh, and the Zombies Run episode Canada is completely hilarious. I was not expecting that celebrity cameo at all!

Current Mood: determined

liv

So, Monday I followed

angrboda's example and tried a new route. A colleague (who is a serious runner who regularly runs marathons) said that he often goes for training runs down a certain minor road, 20 minutes out and 20 minutes back. I hadn't registered the road as an option because from the end it just looks like a residential cul-de-sac, I didn't realize it went on for miles. It's about a mile of almost exactly perfect running road, tarmac'ed actual road but with almost no traffic once you get past the first handful of houses, since it just goes to a farmhouse. And it's along the brow of the hill so although not perfectly flat, it's not nearly as much downhill (forcing me to run uphill on the return leg) as my usual route. However, after a mile it turns into this kind of farm track thing, which is a public footpath (yay), but is muddy and uneven and uphill (boo). I'm guessing my amateur runner pal must do a fairly big cross-country section to take it to 20 minutes.

I think the best plan is going to be to run to the end of the road part and back, and finish the last mile or so by running along the first, relatively flat, section of my previous route (which starts from only 100 metres up the road from the end of this new road). This does mean a slightly awkward stretch running through a the busy village centre and across a multi-road junction, but that section is short, and the combined route would also allow me a full 5K without having to run along the side of a busy road or more than a few metres uphill.

I basically wasn't running at all in the middle section along the farm track, just kind of scrambling through the mud. It wasn't impassable, just you have to figure out where you can safely put your feet, which is obviously really slow. And even the nice flat bit along the ridge I didn't take very fast, partly because it's a new route, and partly because it was on the edge of too cold for my lungs and I wasn't doing brilliantly with breathing. So I only made 3.3 km overall in half an hour, but at least I've discovered a new and possibly better route for future runs.

Whereas today it was definitely too cold and I didn't get away from work before it was starting to get dark, so I dragged myself to the gym and put in 5K at 7.2 kph on the treadmill. Fairly easy, again the main impediment was boredom, in spite of the Zombies, Run! podcast. This time the background music in the gym was less loud, which did help, but I think also my real problem is not so much that I can't hear the dialogue as that I can't hear the specific voice actor who plays Archie, and she was a central character in the previous episode. I couldn't hear her in this episode either but I could hear everybody else, so was much better able to follow the plot.

That gave me a time of 41'46'', and reasonable confidence that I'll be able to manage 7.5 kph on the treadmill soon, even if it takes me a few tries.

Current Mood: curious

liv

Last week I only had one day when time available to run coincided with reasonable weather (and even then my lungs were struggling because it was too cold). Admittedly that was an exceptionally intense week involving dashing off to Sweden, but it's definitely time to admit that I need to be running indoors for most of the rest of the year.

So today I joined the gym on campus, which was relatively painless; in lieu of complicated induction procedures they just ask you to sign a waiver indicating that you're aware that exercise carries risks and promising to be sensible. The gym is reasonably pleasant; it has a somewhat random selection of exercise equipment but I don't have strong views about exactly how my treadmill is set up. And it's 5 minutes walk from my front door, which helps a lot. At least on this occasion I didn't meet any of the students I actually teach; I'm sure I will but the fact that there's a separate changing room for staff makes me feel a lot less self-conscious about this.

And I made myself run 5K on the treadmill, even though I didn't want to. I set it for an easy-ish speed of 7kph and honestly the main obstacle to completing was psychological. I made myself keep going for the full 42½ minutes, though.

I also paid for the rest of Season 2 of Zombies, run! which had deleted itself when the app upgraded. I decided paying £5 for content I'd already bought once was less hassle than trying to argue to get a refund. I found it really difficult to hear the story, though. I think maybe I need to invest in better headphones. It seems that the recent version of Zombies doesn't have the option to set hour-long instead of 30 minute workouts, or at least I couldn't find that setting.

Current Mood: bored

liv

Tuesday I ran after I'd been on my feet teaching most of the day, which was possibly a mistake. Also it started raining when I was exactly at the furthest point from home. So I didn't have anything to gain by cutting short the run, but I also didn't feel at all motivated to push myself. 3.1 km in 30 minutes, which is basically walking pace.

Today I had another go with Zombies, run! because I'm fairly familiar with my route now, and I thought maybe having the distraction / motivation of the story and music would help me to go a bit faster. I did enjoy the final part of the first season 2 side mission, but I didn't go any faster: 3.6 km in about 34½ minutes, still 9'45'' /km. (Long partly because the randomizer chose the two longest songs in my playlist back to back.) I felt weirdly crampy during some of the run too, not in the usual "stitch" location but all along my left side.

I am a bit pissed off with Zombies, run! because the app asked my permission to update, and when I said yes, updated to version 3, which was not what I was expecting. But worse than that, it's turned all the S2 core missions I'd already bought into paid only content and is demanding that I buy an S2 season pass to be able to progress. I was actually planning to give Sixtostart more money anyway, perhaps by actually purchasing ZR3, or perhaps by buying the rest of the supplementary content for S2. But "upgrading" by taking away episodes I'd already paid for is really underhanded and really puts me off.

I'm thinking I should maybe switch to using podcasts instead. Even if they're not specifically designed for running, and I don't get the base-building game, maybe having interesting words and music is good enough. I did find the experience less miserable with interesting story episodes instead of Runkeeper's timechecks. And it's probably good for me to run based on paying attention to my own body and not using external pace cues.

Current Mood: sore

rmc28

I was tempted by burgers with my husband for lunch yesterday so didn't gym, but plan to make it up tomorrow instead.

Today on the crosstrainer I did this 5k Race Mission from season 1, which tells the events of episode 13 from the New Canton point of view. I set the "constant running pace" to 7min/km, which is a bit generous to myself, but meant I could get through the mission in a sensible time for my lunch hour.

Numbers: 36 min, level 5, distance 1.98km
Feeling: hot and nicely tired

rmc28

I had a bit of a failure of motivation the last couple of weeks but I finally managed to get myself down to the gym today for a ~30 min session on the crosstrainer. It actually felt good/familiar to be getting sweaty and feeling my heart and lungs work for the first time in nearly a fortnight. My toe is still a pain when walking, but fine when cycling/crosstraining.

I wasn't sure what to make of today's side-mission, whether the "real life famous person" in it was meant to actually be that person, or someone pretending-in-story to be that person, or whether it was all an elaborate joke I would get if I knew more about them. Maybe All Will Be Revealed later in the season.

Numbers: 32 min, level 4, distance 1.66km

My plan is to go tomorrow & Thursday for similar short sessions and a longish one on Saturday. I need to fidget with the training spreadsheet to adjust for the planned sessions I missed. I'm still working towards being fit enough for the half-marathon at the start of June, on the assumption my broken toe stops hurting to walk/run on by then.

rmc28

So, my last post was me saying I was switching back to straightforward half-hour training sessions in the week and long runs at the weekend. The next morning I walked into a bookcase and broke my toe, which puts me out of running for a while, probably 4-6 weeks. The half-marathon I was going to run on the 4th May is definitely off; in theory my toe might be healed by the other one I'd signed up for on 1st June, but I'm going to have to make a decision nearer the time.

Luckily I can still cycle, and there is a gym convenient to my office with a good offer for university staff, and I can use at least some of the cardio machines there without aggravating the toe injury. So my plan is to keep up my CV fitness at the gym and hope I'm both fit enough and healed-up enough to run on 1st June.

ZR season 3 came out the morning after I broke my toe, which I thought was rather pointed timing. I have taken up the offered season pass so I can access all the season 2 & 3 content as it becomes available. I've become a bit addicted to improving my own little Abel township, which goes much faster now that I get 3 points per episode rather than just 1. I also find the gym pretty boring, so although I want to catch up on season 1 content, I'm going to be prioritising the story-telling sort of content like S2 episodes and the S1 race missions over more general "filler" content like the radio mode and the way I was planning to use the remaining Zom25k episodes.

Today's session: 25 minutes, crosstrainer level 4, ZR Season 2, Episode 6

rmc28

I was away on holiday last week, and opted not to pack my running things. So today I did week 3 session 1 of Zom25k, and it just takes too long. The episode length is about 45 minutes, and with changing/showering time, that ran me well over my lunch hour. I felt pretty good afterward, in particular in letting myself run for rather longer periods than I'm used to in one go at the moment. But I just can't spend that much time away from my desk.

I still like the story-content but the training pattern is only so-so for me. I might listen through the training episodes for the story while doing longer training runs on weekends. But for my weekday runs, I'm going to go back to the main app, and just do 30-min runs. (the only episodes that went seriously over 30 minutes were those where I had unusually long tracks pulled out of the running playlist, and I've removed all those now).

Zombies Run 3 is due out "in April" so I'm busy using up all the content I've already paid for until ZR3 is out and the pricing for season 2 & 3 episodes is clearer.

liv

I really hoped to run outdoors today, as it was really sunny for most of the day. Unfortunately just when I finished work and changed into my running things, it clouded over, and given that even in the sunshine it was on the edge of too cold to get away with running outdoors, I decided I'd better go to the gym, rather than risk setting off my asthma (which anyway has been playing up lately).

I ran for 15 minutes at 7.5 kph, jogged for 5 minutes and completed the remaining 10 minutes at pace again, which is better than I've managed for several weeks. It was on the edge of being painful, lungs-wise, pretty much throughout; completing that felt more like a feat of willpower than a feat of athletic prowess. Anyway still 3.6 km in 30 minutes; it's probably going to be a while before I actually get any faster since my plan is to keep on running for 25 minutes at pace with a 5 minute jogging break, just shift the break until further through the run.

I enjoyed S2 of the Zombies Season 2 side-mission, and I'm looking forward to hearing the conclusion of that sub-plot later in the week.

Current Mood: hungry

liv

I tried increasing my long, slow run pace to 7 kph, which I wasn't sure would be a good idea. But in fact that's about the upper end of what feels good, the whole run just felt like a really good workout. I did 30 minutes at that pace, and I was in a good rhythm and maybe I could even have pressed on, but I'd promised myself that I would drop to a slow jog for the remainder if I made it to 30 minutes. So I did that, running the rest of the distance at 6.5 kph. That gave me a finishing time of 44 minutes, which I'm pretty pleased with. And the whole thing felt a lot more pleasant than trying to run for even 10 minutes at 7.5 kph.

I listened to S1 of the bonus material from the Zombies app, and that was enjoyable. Because I wasn't finding the run miserable I wasn't as bored waiting for the duration of two songs before I got more narrative reward. And since I've been listening to Radio Abel occasionally I really felt emotionally connected to Eugene and Jack, so that was super-tense!

Current Mood: bouncy

liv

Ran at pace, 7.5 kph, for 12½ mins, then 5 minutes slow jogging, then 7½ minutes at pace again, then a brief jogging break before running the last couple of minutes at pace. That felt reasonably good, and I'm going to try for a bit longer at the faster pace next time. For various reasons I'd been on my feet all day so my legs didn't feel too good, but I was able to push through that and my heart and lungs were working hard but basically fine.

Episode 4 brought plenty of drama, which made the running that bit more enjoyable, even though I'm close to the limit of what I can do at the moment. Will aim for another long slow run Thursday or Friday.

Current Mood: working

rmc28

I ran this at the weekend, with the episode length set "about 1 hour" because the goal was "about 5k at about 9 min/km" and I wanted to see how "about 1 hour" felt.

The episode itself was a bit confusing at the start but did then explain itself, and had me gripped right up to the twist ending. I hope there'll be some more backfilling of What Happened Between The Seasons in future episodes. I did find the two-song gap a bit less interesting, not helped when a 12-minute medley got selected from my huge running playlist. So I probably won't do episodes set at "1 hour" again, just use Radio Mode to fill up time if I need to.

At the end of the run I found that the dratted app had failed to record any GPS data for the first ~25 minutes, so I got no useful information about my running pace out of it. I think I'm just going to have RunKeeper run in parallel for all future weekend runs: ZR keeps me entertained but RunKeeper gives me more reliable data.

I'm also going to edit my running playlist to take out the excessively long songs (everything over 6 minutes?).

liv

Had a somewhat busy day, but even if I didn't get to the gym until the evening, it's weekend so I had time for a long slow run. My goal had been to improve my time from a couple of weeks back by 20%; in fact, once I'd run for 43 minutes I was within sight of the virtual finish line so I just kept going for the last 2 minutes. Giving me my first actual 5K time since June last year (!), namely 45 minutes.

As long runs are, it was boring but not too uncomfortable. Having two songs between zombie narrative snippets felt like too long without a reward, so I was clockwatching a bit. Zombies S2 ep 3 was fun, partly cos Dr Myers is totally my favourite character, and it picked up the story of the viral material from the middle of S1 again.

I'm fairly sure I am not capable of running 5K at 7 kph yet, but I'm not quite sure how best to build up to that. I'll experiment over the next few weeks.

Current Mood: pleased

liv

Didn't make it to the gym until really quite late this evening, and I was tired and hungry. Still, I managed 10 minutes at pace / 5 minutes jogging twice over, giving a total distance of 3.6 km. Having listened to the zombies episode again I found it engaging and enjoyable, though it's another long one. Lots of other things in my life are annoying at the moment, but I succeeded in completing my planned run, so that's something.

Current Mood: grumpy

rmc28

(I ran a half-marathon last weekend. I'm still bloody proud of that; also that I was physically able to run again by Wednesday, but logistically couldn't manage it until yesterday.)

Yesterday I set out to run 10k - it ended up being more like 11k because of phone faff, but no big deal. It was really in two parts: the first was another Galloway Magic-Mile run taking ~3 miles/5k, and the second part, was a 5k "race mission" from Zombies Run season 1.

The Magic Mile went ok: the fast mile is always a bit horrible because it's running right at my limits and it's meant to be, but even so, I find myself unenthused about doing it very often. I had to walk for at least five minutes afterward before I stopped wanting to be sick. I didn't get the times out of RunKeeper till I got home, but I covered that mile in 9:37 which is nearly 40 seconds faster than the last one I did, back in January. That also translates almost exactly to a pace of 6min/km which would let me do 5k in 30 minutes. If I could sustain it for 5k, which currently: hell no.

Anyway, I have a new faster training pace of 9min/km, which indicates run:walk intervals of either 30:45 or 30:30 (it's 14:30 min/mile so exactly halfway between the two). I'll stick with 30:45 for now as I already have a tendency to go too fast when training and then regret it towards the end of a long run. I'm going to use this for the next 12 weeks, for the next two half-marathons I've signed up for.

Once I'd got back up to running gently and had covered the first 5k of my route, I fired up the race mission. This fitted nicely in after episode 13 and followed up one of the plot threads that seemed to have been ignored in the main season. There is a choice to use GPS or "constant pace" to estimate the distance covered. My phone is known-unreliable at calculating ZR distances on the fly (though the run once uploaded to Zombie Link is accurate enough) so I gave it a hoped-for pace of 8 min/km but I actually ended up running slower than that. The mission completed in pretty much exactly 40 minutes but as with standard ZR episodes let me carry on running until I told it I was done. The main difference from standard is that the audio dialogue didn't fit in between music tracks, but just lowered the music volume and came on when it wanted to, I think at appropriate "distances".

The plot apparently continues in the 10k and 20k race missions. My training plan will let me run these in the next few weeks and I'm looking forward to it; there's also a little pack of another 5,10 & 20k races I can buy for a small amount and I probably will.

From tomorrow I'm planning to make the shift from twice weekly lunchtime runs to thrice-weekly, and I'm going to do it by working through 24 episodes of Zom25k. This is partly to make the increase less challenging, and partly because I want to use another go through c25k to try to get my short-distance speed up, but the main reason is I want to hear the extra story content. [overly honest fitness methods?]

liv

7½ minutes at 7.5 kph, and that was a real struggle, so I jogged for five minutes. The second lot of 7.5 kph was actually starting to feel quite good, and then the final stretch after another jogging recovery period set off my asthma. I made myself keep going on the grounds that it was only 5 minutes to the end, but it wasn't very pleasant. 3.6 km total.

For some reason I couldn't properly hear the zombies narrations at all, so I think I'll rerun episode 2 next week. If the asthma wasn't bad enough, I ended up waiting over an hour for a bus home from the gym. I no longer live within reasonable walking distance of the gym, it's only a couple of miles but it's up a steep hill. Normally the bus service is fairly reliable, though. In any case, within a few weeks it should be warm enough to abandon the gym and run outdoors in the extremely pretty campus where I now live.

Current Mood: annoyed

liv

I've been moving house and suffering quite a lot with asthma the past couple of weeks, so this was my first run for a while. I decided to use the transition from Season 1 to Season 2 of the zombies as a cue to change my training regime, particularly because I want to build up to actually running 5K again, which I haven't done for some months.

Today my lungs still weren't feeling that great so I decided to go for slower running over a longer distance: 36 minutes at 6.7 kph, then completed the rest of the 5 km at a brisk, 6 kph walk. 6.7 kph is a pace I can manage fairly comfortably and just keep going, so I didn't struggle too much with 4 km in 36 minutes. I covered 5 km in a smidge over 46 minutes, but I wasn't actually running the whole way. I definitely find it more enjoyable, both during the run and in terms of an endorphin buzz afterwards, to run slower for longer distances than push myself to go as fast as I can. But I don't always have enough time for long, slow runs and I do still want to improve my best pace if I can.

I set Season 2 Mission 1 to an hour of play rather than 30 minutes. Another fun, engaging story, though I'm a bit confused about what happened between the end of Season 1 and here. My plan is to alternate between continuing to try for 30 minutes at a steady 7.5 kph, and extending my time at 6.7 kph (if I can do the whole 5K at that pace it should take me under 45 minutes, and if I can do 5K at 7 kph I will beat my best time so far), and possibly some intervals; I'm considering using the Zom25K app to give some structure to the interval training, while setting a faster pace for the running intervals.

Current Mood: good

rmc28

Second zombie run of the week, another sunny day but a bit windier than Wednesday. Totally seeing what liv meant about cliffhangers! 2 episodes to go. And then, I could go straight into series 2, but I'm considering getting the zombie couch-to-5k app first.

I've been spending time noodling over a training spreadsheet and thinking about routines and habits, and decided two things:
1. I want to run three lunchtimes a week now that I'm full time (up from two)
2. I like running long distance, but at my pace, half-marathon training runs can take 3+ hours and more than that is too much time out of a weekend.

So I'm aiming for a "steady state" of 3x 30 min runs, plus 1 long weekend run which will cycle through 5k, 10k & 20k. Every other 5k run will be a "magic mile" run so that every 6 weeks I get to update my long slow training pace and hopefully see that start to speed up. My weekend runs will be taking up ~1, 2, or 3 hours, less as I get faster, so I'll be balancing the fun-to-me of long runs with not eating all my weekend time (and seriously testing the patience of my family). This also has the advantage that if I want to do more half-marathons, I will basically already be in condition to run them.

I'm still having trouble with the GPS registering my position until some way into the run, and it's the sort of problem I don't realise until I get back, which is annoying. I was going to try one of the zombie "Race Missions" this weekend - I need to do a 5k run, and there's a 5k race in what I've already bought - but that's only going to work if the GPS behaves itself.

liv

Running still feeling awful. I decided to go easy on myself and alternate 5 minutes at 7.5 kph with 5 minutes at 6.5 kph. I took a short walking break after the third fast section, then did the last couple of minutes at pace. Total 3.5 km in 30 minutes.

I found the final episode of the season really annoying; I appreciate that they have to leave things open-ended so they can sell season 2, but this left the protag in the middle of dire situation and didn't clear up any of the loose ends from earlier in the storyline.

Not at all sure what I'm going to do next; maybe carry straight on to season 2, or maybe mix things up a bit more. I'm somewhat tempted to try C25K again, but setting a faster pace for the running intervals. There is a Zombies25K app...

Current Mood: frustrated

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Couch to 5k

Entries tagged with apps:zombies run

Week 1, day 1

40 minute 5K

Novelty / routine

Back on the treadmill

Two more slow runs

ZR Season 1, Race Mission 4

ZR Season 2, episode S4

All change and into Zombies Run season 2

Zom25k - not working for me

30 mins: 3.6 km

5K: 44 minutes

Zombies s2 day 4

Zombies Run S2 ep 1

Made it to 5K again

Zombies 2 day 2

New magic-mile time & Zombies 5k race mission

30 mins: 3.6 km

Zombies 2 day 1

Zombies Run 21

Zombies season 1 completed

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