Week 2 Day 3 (part 1)

Tonight, I completed the 2nd Week of the Couch to 5K program.  As I mentioned in my first post, (I think I mentioned it…) I started out with Week Two, instead of Week One.  I did this because I did Week One several weeks ago and thought it was fairly easy, so I decided to speed things up this time around and started out with Week Two. 

And it was really, really hard.

I have decided, for my own sanity, to do Week Two twice.  So instead of moving on to Week Three next, I will do Week Two, Day 1 again.

I know that the point of this program is to push you – but trust me, doing three more reps of Week Two is plenty of pushing.

Brisk five-minute warm-up walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes. Five-minute cool-down.

This is what I did tonight.  It’s the third time I’ve done it, but…. (wait for it…) it’s the first time I’ve done the WHOLE THING.  The first two times I did it, I was not able to run all six 90-second runs.  This time, I did ALL SIX!

The first four weren’t the ones that were tough.  It was the fifth and sixth ones that got to me.  The past few days, I would pretty much just skip the fifth run, and the sixth one I would just do probably half.

But tonight – tonight I did ALL SIX RUNS!

I think there are a couple of factors that help me here – first of all, of course, I’m building up endurance.  Things are going to seem hard the first time around, but the more I do them, the easier they will get. 

Secondly, I changed my workout playlist.  I have recently started listening to K-Love on my drive back and forth from school.  It’s the only radio station that doesn’t go fuzzy on me between Mena and Arkadelphia, PLUS because it is listener-supported, it has NO commercials.  Y’all, I have fallen in LOVE with Praise & Worship music.  So – you guessed it, I changed all of my workout music to Praise & Worship songs.  Well, mostly.  It’s probably 98% Praise & Worship, with a few other soft rock/pop songs thrown in.  Listening to the encouraging words makes my run SO much nicer.

And lastly, during the “tough spots” of my workout – runs 5 and 6, I kept saying over and over in my head, (and aloud) “I can do ALL things through CHRIST who strengthens me!”