Happily Ever After

Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running

Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.

Getting Down To Business

by Russell Turner - 19:48 on 10 October 2017

It’s getting serious – today was the first day of the six-week couch to 5k training programme. Runner’s World (Matchgirl’s favourite magazine) recommends 1min run and 1min walk x10. The Virgin London Marathon website suggests 30secs run and 30secs walk x20. I chose to mix the two (as there are squillions of different 5k schedules).

VLM promises that at the end of six weeks I’ll be able to run for 30 minutes non-stop. We’ll see – I don’t think I could manage that 40 years ago. Today’s exertion took 20 minutes, after which I had very little running left in me. I blame the sun.

The silver lining is that my heart rate quickly returned to normal, although I’m unable to quantify the change because Matchgirl’s cast-off Garmin, of which I’m the grateful recipient, no longer includes the heart monitor attachment. Other bits and bobs still work, though, so my shiny new Garmin Connect web page shows the first of the stats that Matchgirl pores over so carefully to gauge her progress towards Running Queen.

My secondhand Garmin Forerunner 210. Matchgirl likes to upgrade.

For the record, my 20-minute run, over mostly flat roads, took 22 minutes (I confess to some extra bits of walking), covered 2.06 miles at an average pace of 10.37 minutes per mile, and I expended 328 calories. Garmin even generates a nifty little Google map in case I forget where I’ve been. When she returns, Matchgirl’s promised to show me how to set the Garmin to record laps and splits so soon there’ll be even more stats. I can hardly wait.

I’ll be pounding the road again on Thursday. RW wants me to do 2mins run and 4mins walk x5. VLM insists on 1min run and 1min walk x10. Decisions decisions.

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