So this is how it works: Couch to 5k is a 9-week programme, with 3 runs per week. (You’re allowed/encouraged to repeat a week if it’s proving tough.) Each one starts with a 5-minute warmup walk, followed by a combination of walking/running intervals until the 5-minute cooldown at the end. Week 1 was 60 seconds of running, followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeated eight times; Week 2 is 90 seconds of running followed by 120 seconds of walking, repeated six times.

The grid below probably isn’t the smoothest way to explain this, but it does give a fairly good overview of how the running periods (coloured red) get longer over the programme, and the walking periods get shorter before disappearing entirely.

Week 5, Day 3 there is the dreaded one: 20 minutes of running, with no breaks. I’m told it is not actually impossible.

More pictures: here’s the elevation of my usual, hilly route, courtesy of the very useful WalkJogRun.net:

1: Warmup walk, quite steeply uphill. But that’s okay. Because it’s walking.
2: This bit of the run is vaguely uphill but not drastically so, quite a nice way to get started.
3: That slope there is vertical. VERTICAL. The hill isn’t quite vertical, but it’s pretty damn close. I hate that hill.
4: The steepish downhill section is trickier than it looks, but it’s easy compared to the hills.
5: Final hill. Damn the hill.
6: I’ve never actually noticed an uphill slope here, so either this one’s a hiccup or I’ve successfully stamped it flat by now.

I wasn’t expecting week 2 to feel all that different from week 1. The runs are only thirty seconds longer, after all, and since there’s fewer of them you’re only running for an extra minute in total, and how hard can that be? But it turns out to be harder than I expected.

I think a lot of it was down to my brain now expecting the running to stop after 60 seconds, so the first two runs on Day 1 were the toughest – after that it got a little easier. I took a slightly different route that day, which made the overall distance longer but cut out the steeper bits of the hill I usually cross. The last part of the way took me down the always-busy Byres Road, so my last run was a slalem course navigating round pedestrians.

On day two, the first few runs were still hard. I was deliberately making sure I wasn’t going too fast, and I noticed that I didn’t feel tired until I was about two-thirds of the way through, so I’m sure it’s mostly a mental block after the 60-second intervals of week 1. (The first part of my run is all uphill, but the slope’s very gentle, so I don’t think it can be contributing that much towards the issue.) The third run was easier, and I was getting into my stride by then. I’d originally planned to do the longer, flatter route again, but after getting used to the pace after the third run, I turned off for the steeper route instead.

This one zig-zags across the steeper slopes of one of Glasgow’s many drumlins; I coped with it fine during Week 1, although the way the runs were spaced there had me walking up the first steep uphill stretch and only running on the second one, usually on my final run. But this time, with the 90-second runs, I had to run most of the way up the first uphill, and bloody hell is it steep. I mean, you notice it when you’re walking (I’ve seen quite tough-looking cyclists get off their bikes and push them up that short stretch), but you really notice it when you’re running. And every step gets steeper as you get closer to the top. I was really, seriously wondering whether I’d be able to keep running, even though I wasn’t going any faster than a medium walk and was absolutely determined not to drop out of any of the scheduled runs, just because it really seemed that my muscles just weren’t going to be able to keep on pushing me forward, but just as I got to that point the woman narrating the podcast told me to start walking again.

After that, the final two runs were fine: the fifth was downhill, which is tricky but breathable, and the sixth was uphill again, on the same stretch that always ended up being the last run in Week 1. It was a lot easier than I was expecting this time, though – maybe just in comparison to the earlier hill! Still, I finished in good time without being too exhausted. Bring on Day 3.

And still not collapsed into an exhausted pile of goo!

Week 1 wasn’t bad, all told. Running is a lot easier now I’ve got an iPhone armband, a little waist pouch thing to hold my keys, and a top made out of the magic material that keeps you dry when you’d otherwise be slathered in sweat. A lot of running clothes seem to be black – nice for pretending you’re a lycra-clad cat burglar sprinting unnoticed past everyone else on the pavement, but maybe not a great fit for crossing roads on dark winter days – so I was a bit annoyed to find out that the only alternative for women was hot pink. Ugh. Thankfully, one of the climbing/walking shops in town had some blue and gray tops on sale hidden away at the back.

(I remember this from buying walking boots, as well – the shop that sold about fifty kinds for women didn’t have a single pair that didn’t include some pink, somewhere. Because otherwise, my God, how would people know you’re a girl?)

Day 3 was a bit more energetic than the other two. For all but the first run, I worked on trying to set a pace aI little faster than the light jog I’d been doing before, just to push myself that bit further. It worked, too – I ended up much further ahead than before on my usual route at the end of the eighth run, and not totally exhausted either. My calf muscles ached a little the next day, but I shut them up with smugness.

It gets a lot easier with a podcast. I went with the NHS ones, which mix inoffensively encouraging music with a guide who tells you when you to stop and start running and occasionally lets you know that you’re Doing Really Well!, which might sound annoying but is oddly quite nice.

And it was easy.

Not easy in the sense that it didn’t involve effort, or that I wasn’t glad that the schedule finished when it did, but definitely easy in the sense that it was absolutely doable, without pain or total exhaustion or even getting hugely out of breath. Sixty seconds isn’t a long time; by the point you’ve really registered that you’re running, it’s almost time to walk again. So what if I needed a couple of minutes to get my breath back at the end, or I thought dark and evil thoughts when I realised that the last run on this route would once again be up a hill, or my legs ached like achy things the next day? It was very, very doable, and it’s a great feeling to realise that something is well within your ability. Even when the something is yet another hill.

I started running because it works for horses. There are an awful lot of explanations for how running will make you fit, but most of them seem to involve developing a strong interest in things like muscle groups and elliptical trainers and basal metabolic rates and resting heart rates and carbohydrates and stretches and how to navigate furious internet arguments on all the above, so I’m sticking to that: it works for horses. You want to get a horse fit, nothing beats a regular pattern of gradually-increasing exercise that includes a lot of trotting up hills.

So I’m doing Couch to 5k. It’s simple, it’s structured, and it doesn’t sneer at you for caring very little about using the word ‘cardiovascular’ on a regular basis. Also, it promises to turn couch potatoes into people who can run for thirty minutes at a time, three times a week – and while I’m not quite a couch potato, I think I’m growing roots.

Day 1, though? Day 1 was a failure.

The plan for the first day of the Couch to 5k plan is 60 seconds of jogging, followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeated eight times. How do you measure 60/90 seconds? With a watch (which I don’t wear), or a stopwatch (excellent, I’ll just grab one from my secret stopwatch horde), or one of the many, many, many Couch to 5k apps and podcasts. (True fact: if you listened to all all the C25K podcasts end-to-end, the universe would grow cold and die before you returned from your run.) But there were big, grey clouds outside growing closer, so rather than wait to download one of the podcasts, I thought “eh, I can count to 90″ and headed out.

The warmup walk was fine. It felt good to be outside breathing fresh air, or as fresh as air gets in a city, and although the pavements were quite crowded I felt like I was setting a good pace. When the rain started coming down in my first run – very lightly, hardly there at all, just an occasional splash on the tarmac – I didn’t even mind. Hey, it’s raining and I’m still out here running, I hereby award myself 10,000 points and a trophy.

Except… you think it’s easy to count 60 seconds, or 90 seconds. And it is, mostly. Unless you’re also trying to keep track of where you’re going, and which road to turn down next, and how many 60-second runs you’ve done so far out of the eight you’re supposed to do, and the rain gets heavier, and heavier, and heavierandheavierandheavier until your chin’s almost tucked in your chest, and before you know it you’ve totally overshot the point at which you wanted to turn off the main road and you can’t remember whether that’s three or four more runs you need to do, and how is it even possible for rain to come down this hard outside the tropics?

But I kept running. Even the last run, which ended up being most of a short, steep hill I hadn’t intended to go anywhere near. And by the time I’d reached the top of that hill and worked out a quick way home, the rain had already soaked me through so thoroughly that it didn’t matter how quickly I got back, since it couldn’t possibly get any worse. (And it couldn’t; I had to wring out my top over the sink once I finally made it back.)

It was a failure on almost every count, except the most important one: I still got out there and ran.

So next time: podcast. And more attention to the map beforehand. And preferably no evil torrential rain. And, um, maybe I’ll call this one Day 0, and start Couch to 5k properly on the next run.