A few months back we had a very pleasant holiday with our friends. We spent four days cross-country skiing, sledding, painting, cooking good food, playing board games and of course some Pokémon GO. We really enjoyed relaxing and having some time with no hurry anywhere. Naturally we also spent a lot of time in the sauna as well as in a hot tub.
One evening, we were sitting in sauna with my friend, after a couple of beers and we talked about doing sports to stay (get) healthy and in good condition. My friend told me that he always needs to have some goal in order to be better motivated in doing sports. And somehow we agreed on attending a marathon event in August. We were only going to go for the 10km run though as it would be maybe a bit unrealistic to aim for a marathon, or even a half marathon as neither of us has really been running earlier much, or at all. Somehow we also agreed to try to run the 10km distance in 45 minutes or less, which didn’t sound that bad at the time.
After I had read a bunch of blog posts and watched a few videos about how to start running I realized that running 10km in 45 minutes or less is actually not a piece of cake at all! What was I thinking? I’ve never even liked running and since my school years I’ve been going for a run maximum a couple of times a year, if even that. The longest distance I had ever run (without walking or resting in between) is maybe 4km. What was I thinking???
I also learned that running is not simple. There are a gazillion of things to take care of, like having a good running posture. One should also do other kinds of exercises in addition to walking and running, like strength training and static and dynamic stretching. Phew!
Now I’ve been doing several runs already – I sniffed out my old Polar sports watch, and created myself a running program on the Polar Flow website. So I got a weekly training program readily made, with different kinds of exercises. As you can see from the photo below, I’ve really started enjoying the runs.
I actually found it hardest to stay within the heart rate zones defined in the running program. Several articles hinted that in order to become a good runner, one needs to exercise in the right heart rate zones. In the beginning, I couldn’t even run as my heart rate always went too high so I had to walk most of the “very light” and “light” heart rate zone training.
I can now run more than 5km without having to walk in between. And I can run that 5km in about 30 minutes which means I could theoretically do 10km in about an hour but I doubt I could keep up the same pace. My longest run so far was 8km and it took 1h 10min. Seems I have plenty of running still to do in order to be able to run that 10km even in an hour. The best thing with all this is that I’ve started to actually enjoy running the first time in my life. Going for a run is longer something I have to do, but something I want to do 🙂