Thursday, October 04, 2007

From Metal to Meat

Last year, I wanted to ride my bike to work, a 12 mile ride one way. I created a route near my house to start training on and dubbed it the Loop of Death. When I started, I could barely finish it on my bike in 15 minutes. I was in really sad shape. Eventually, I conquered the Loop of Death on my bike and moved on to riding to work. That went great for a while but after 2 major incidents in a week, my bike ended up disassembled on the porch, sad and forgotten.

A little under 6 months ago, I started working out with a trainer. I’ve been lifting weights with her a few times a week and doing cardiovascular exercise 3-6 days a week. One thing I have not had any success with is running. At 290 lbs, running hurt. It hurt on the road. It hurt on a treadmill. I wanted to run but I couldn’t seem to hack it.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been running on the treadmill for about 12 minutes during my cardio work. I’ve improved a bit but not nearly as much as I wanted. Right now, I run 4.3 mph for 12 minutes and I’m OK.

Enter yesterday. I didn’t do any cardio Monday or Tuesday and my trainer told me to do SOMETHING on Wednesday, even if it was really light. Well, I was meeting friends for dinner so I couldn’t get to the gym. I decided to run/walk the old loop of death after dinner. I figured I’d run until I got really tired then walk the rest and that should be about 30-35 minutes.

I set of running and the next thing I knew, I was running back up the driveway in just 26m42s. I ran 2.2 miles without stopping and without thinking I would die. I could have sprinted at the end or run a while more. I’m still in shock.

Maybe I will be able to run a 5K soon. Maybe I’ll even be able to work on improving my time, instead of just trying to finish.

No comments: