I have started running again. I say again – I actually started in February 2017, and surprised everyone (no one more than myself) by keeping it up for four months! I didn’t have a particular plan when I started, I just walked a bit then started running around a set route, trying to keep running the whole time as much as I could and gradually increasing the distance. I was up to three miles by the end of May. Then we went on holiday to Italy and on the final day there I developed a very weird achy pain in my arm. Once we were home the aches spread to all my limbs, to the point where I couldn’t sit for long periods of time, but walking around was also uncomfortable. I went to the doctor and he said it was just muscular and to take ibuprofen, which I did and after about two weeks it improved. But that was the end of my running for a while, for fear of getting injured again (although I’m not convinced the achy-ness had anything to do with running as I’d had a full week off by the time it started).
Fast-forward to the end of January this year, and I decided to start running again. This time I am doing the Couch to 5K plan. I have downloaded the free Public Health England One You Couch to 5K app and Jo Whiley tells me when it’s time to start and stop running (the app is in association with the BBC so you can choose one of four voices to talk to you as you go). I picked the Couch to 5K as I knew it would let me build up slowly and hopefully stop me getting injured. At the time of writing I am on Week 2 which is still more walking than it is running. You’re supposed to do each week’s programme three times, but I skipped the third session of Week 1. With the amount of walking I do I am not a complete couch potato, which is the starting point the app is designed for. And in Week 1 you run for a minute at a time and each time I felt as though I wanted to keep going a little longer (which is probably what’s supposed to happen) so I moved straight on to Week 2.
So far, I’m enjoying it. You can play your own music on your phone whilst the app talks to you (it just turns the volume down on the music a little so you can hear Jo (or whoever) talking to you), so I use Spotify for music and the C25K podcast just plays over the top of it.
For my third run of Week 3 I swapped the voice to Sarah Millican for a change. I kind of felt like I was cheating on Jo, but the problem is that the voice over is just the same thing for all three runs each week (well, until the intervals start changing within the weeks, when I guess they will be different) so by the time you’ve heard the advice and/or jokes twice over you want to hear something new.
I did not like Sarah Millican. She appeared to be reading from the same script, although with less conviction, and she also made my music shut off when she was talking. (Actually no, I can’t blame Sarah for that, it’s a quirk of listening to your music on Amazon Music (I usually use Spotify). The same thing happened when I switched back to Jo for Week 4.)
So it was back to Jo for Week 4 and this is the point where you are running five minutes at a time. And it’s really OK. The following week was running eight minutes at a time. And that was OK too. Harder, but OK. And then the Beast From the Chuffing East descended upon us and put paid to my running for a whole week. This worried me a little, I have to admit. The next run on the schedule was 20 minutes of straight running, no walking intervals. Would I be able to do that after an enforced break of a whole week? Stay tuned for Part 2 to find out!
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