Couch to 5k

I didn't manage my goal of convincingly running for 25 minutes at 8½' /km. My second and third week 7 runs were much less good than the first one, hard work and slow. I felt I improved from 7.2 to 7.3 but the numbers didn't reflect that.

Then my life exploded the way it always does in September and I missed a couple of weeks. I decided to restart by seeing if I could run 30 minutes slowly, and yes I could. Second run again felt a bit less of a struggle but within the limits of measurement was the same pace and distance. My third, so-called "graduation" run was somewhat let down by Zombies, Run! being screwy. It didn't think I had covered 1 km until well over 10 minutes into the run, though by known markers on the route I was pretty sure I had. Then when I looked at the splits it claimed I'd run the first km in under 8½ minutes, but the overall average pace it reported was considerably slower than any of the splits, which is not how averages work. My best estimate is slightly slower than 9' /km.

Today I went back to running in 5 minute intervals, and managed pretty much 9' /km exactly. Pacing was a bit off; each interval was slower than the last. But I felt like I had a good workout and challenged myself in a different way from running slowly for the whole 30 minutes.

So I don't know. I was hoping that going all the way through the C25K programme again would produce real improvements, but I'm still running at about the same pace I was before I went back to the formal incremental programme. And even that not reliably; easily a quarter of my runs are much slower than that for no very obvious reason. On the positive side, I can do something which I couldn't do at the start of the summer, namely run for 30 minutes continuously with no walking breaks. And I think, though I'm not completely sure, that my overall fitness is better, which is most of the point.

And we're past the equinox and rapidly running out of daylight, so I need a new plan if I'm going to keep this up. I think I need to join the gym at work and go back to running on treadmills.

Many thanks to everybody who comments with encouragement, and posts about your own C25K experiences. This community definitely helps.

The C25K programme is very sensible in explicitly telling you that you have to do the final 30 minute run three times in week 9; having achieved my intermediate goal, it was hard to make myself go back to the gym and do it again. But I did, and ran at 7.2 kph for 3/4 of the time (22.5 minutes) instead of only 2/3 of the time on Monday. That didn't measurably improve my distance (4 km in 35 minutes including the warmup), but it's definitely progress. My lungs and calves kind of hate me, but I feel good that I'm still keeping on.