Elicit Substance

A horrible thing has happened last Saturday. I found myself waking up at close to my regular Work Day alarm clock time.

I'm not a morning person, so realizing I can't get back to sleep at 4:30 AM is disconcerting. Since I have a 6-hour commitment to the personal trainer cert class on Saturdays, I had no time to nap in the afternoon which is my usual schedule.

Remembering my commitment to my virtual running buddy, Ben from Becoming Timberman, I decided to get in a run.

At 6 AM I checked in at Weather.com and found out that it was 47 degrees. Looking outside, I noticed that it was still pitch dark out there - not even a glimmer of a sun-brightening horizon to be seen. Yes, Weather.com, I believe you when you say it's cloudy, but it's also DARK. It was an easy decision to hit the treadmill instead of the road.

I opened my workout spreadsheet (yes, old habits die hard and I still plot out everything on a spreadsheet) and checked my runs since I got back from Texas in September... ummm... there were *cough* three multiple entries. All *cough* three*cough* runs were on the treadmill for 47 minutes to fit in a 5K. The last entry was October 1st. Okay, maybe 3 weeks off is stretching that recovery theory. All were at 4.1 MPH, which is mostly a brisk walk and let's keep it at a level 1% grade... did you know that 0 - .5% grade is actually slightly downhill? I read it on the internet so it must be true.

I decided to start out where I had...um,  started out, adding in a 5 minute warm-up and stretch in the front. I noticed that at 4.1 MPH, I can sort of jog so I started doing a jogging pyramid. I would jog for 10 seconds and rest for the remainder of the minute, next minute, 15 seconds and rest, 20 and rest and so on until I reached 35 seconds. Then I went back to 30, 25, until I got back to 10 seconds. Since I haven't been doing any running, this seemed like an easy way to get in that aerobic base mileage and it also made the time go by faster.

Mixed Bag
I wish I could say that I did the pyramid four times and was done but alas, at about 25 minutes in, I felt a serious tightness in my Achilles tendon. This is nothing new but it always feels scary. Not wanting to bag the workout or my tendon, I started walking, dropped my speed down to 3.5 MPH and raised the grade to 4%. This lowered the impact on my leg and was just steep enough to get in a good stretch to loosen it while keeping my heart rate from going too low.

At 36 minutes in, I went back to 4.0 MPH at 1% and did one more jogging pyramid. Then I walked it out to the end, finishing the 5K in 48 minutes and averaged 73% of my maximum heart rate.

That was definitely not as fun as taking a nap.