It didn’t actually take me several months to get round to them, just a long time to do the update

Week 8 was really, surprisingly tough. Three 28-minute runs. I thought I’d got comfortable enough after week 7, especially doing the exact same route, but days 1 and 2 teetered on the edge between ‘hard’ and ‘really uncomfortably hard’ all the same.

After day 2 I thought a lot of this might be down to running the same route, letting my brain get into unhelpful patterns of ‘oh God there’s another corner after this one and then a hill and then blargh’, so on day 3, I decided to change things up a bit and do the usual run in reverse.

Runkeeper’s elevation map of that run demonstrates why this was not a brilliant idea:

Friendly Podcast Narrator Laura mentioned during the warmup walk that these continuous runs might feel ‘a bit relentless’ at first, when you’re used to running intervals. That’s a perfect description. It’s easy to train your brain to cope with the intervals punctuated with walking breaks, but setting off to run the whole way takes a certain amount of mental recalibration. That, plus getting ill halfway through the week and having my running schedule get all messed up as a result, made Week 7 the toughest so far. 

Day 1 – 25-minute run. Tough. Tough verging on hellish. Legs totally happy until halfway point, then degenerate into whiny despair. Struggle to end, speeding up for last 60 seconds as Laura suggests, because I know it’s all mental and I’m not really all that exhausted. Turns out that I am, by the end. 2.13 miles.

Day 1.5, rest day: get food poisoning. About which I won’t go into details here, because trust me, you don’t want to know, but it wasn’t conducive to going out for some exercise. One rest day became three rest days.

Day 2 – 25-minute run. Thought bacteria had finished wreaking havoc on my body. Was proved wrong. Continued running anyway out of sulky determination to not let it win, which may not have been wisest decision. 2.23 miles.

Day 2.5 – another rest day. Which becomes two rest days, to see off the last of the food poisoning. Which becomes three rest days, because the food poisoning refuses to go.

Day 3 – 25-minute run. Expecting it to get easier by this point but ohhhhhhh no. Again, first half fine, second half feels like a miserable slog. Refusing to let my complaining muscles win, I speed up for the last minute as suggested once again. 2.31 miles.

Day 3.5 – another rest day, which becomes two rest days because then it snows and the snow melts and refreezes and the pavements are lethal. Grump. Decide to make Week 7 four runs rather than three, given all the interruption.

Day 4 – 25-minute run. Resign self to misery, but something’s changed. Halfway through my legs start to get a bit tired, but don’t lodge formal complaints with my brain; my heart’s thumping, but not protesting about it. The rest of the run still ahead of me doesn’t look easy, but doesn’t look impossible either, and I’m no longer fighting the urge to give up and start walking with every footstep. Speed up for the last sixty seconds, make it to the top of the sloping path leading up to a bridge back over the river I’ve already crossed three times during the run. 2.4 miles.

I’m getting faster? I’m not trying to get faster. And yet, there it is; I’ve gone from a twelve-and-a-half minute mile to a ten-and-a-half, all while thinking I was absolutely going to collapse and give up and quite possibly gasp out ‘I – hate – running!’ with my last breath. Turns out, getting fitter isn’t the part that’s a mind game.

The dreaded 20-minute run is over!

The first part of the run is a gentle uphill slope for about half a mile, and it’s usually the toughest part, too, so I slowed my usual pace right down to keep myself going for the rest of the run. It helped to tell myself that as soon as my first running foot hit the ground I had under 20 minutes to go, and even though I’m running for time rather than distance, it helped to think of the run in terms of the distance I’d need to cover rather than the time I’d need to spend running.

I was surprised when the podcast narrator said I was halfway through – and by that point I was on a downhill slope anyway, wasn’t feeling out of breath, and was happy to keep on going. The steep hill that came soon after wasn’t much fun, but as ever it was manageable, and I got my breath back fine on the way down again. The only unpleasant bit of the run was coming back down Byres Road for the last five minutes or so, which was (as ever) crowded with people and required a lot of slowing down and speeding up and dodging around the crowds, which I always find more tiring than a straight steady run. Just as I was starting to think I really was getting quite tired now and my calf muscles wanted to go and lie down for a long, long time, the narrator said there were only sixty seconds left, and I knew I’d make it all the way to the end.

1.7 miles in 20 minutes. Not as fast as I could have been, but less exhausted than I was expecting. I can always concentrate on picking up the speed again in the longer consecutive runs in weeks 7-9.

Week 6, day 1 is a return to intervals:

Run 5 minutes
Walk 3 minutes
Run 8 minutes
Walk 3 minutes
Run 5 minutes.

Because I decided to push myself a little more speed-wise and get a faster pace than I’d been managing in the previous run, this was definitely tougher, and the steep hill that came in half-way through the 8-minute run was hard in a way it hadn’t really been for a while. This was also about the time that the podcast narrator said that it was probably quite tempting to go faster than last week, that wouldn’t be a great idea, which was not really great timing. If it’s really that tempting and unwise for everyone, why not mention it at the start? Or must we all learn from the hubris that comes of struggling up a steep hill through the Botanics at a pace of about 0.00005 miles per hour, while every toddler in Glasgow is out playing with its mother? Bah. Still, I kept up the same pace overall for all the runs, coming in a little short of a 10-minute mile.

As for the hills, I’m sure they’re doing me a world of good but I’m not loving them. My route will have to get longer again this week (right now the five-minute cooldown walk ends only after I’ve got back to my building, gone up the steps to my flat, and made it across the living room to the kitchen, which leaves little room for expanding), and it’s not looking good terrain-wise…

Week 5 is a change to the pattern of all the previous weeks, where the same run was repeated 3 times. This week, the sessions go like this:

Day 1: Run for 5 minutes, walk for 3, run for 5, walk for 3, and then run for 5.
Day 2: Run for 8 minutes, walk for 5, and then run for 8.
Day 3: Run for 20 minutes.

Day 3 is the one that scares people. You can see why.

I finished day 2 today, after a fairly easy and uneventful day 1. Day 2 was noticeably tougher, especially in the first 8-minute run, but I did notice that most of my issues with it were mental ones – there’s no other reason it should have felt tougher in the first five minutes of the run, at least.

I’ve developed a good system for dealing with my inherent laziness, which would prefer to sit at home and play internet spaceships than go out for a run: hear out its objections, but make it clear it still doesn’t get a vote. If I try to ignore its complaining, it just complains louder until I do pay attention. If I don’t ignore it, but instead start trying to counter all the points it makes – “yes, it will be cold outside and I’ll be worn out and tired, but I’ll feel so good by the end of the run!” – I get exhausted before I’ve even begun. So instead, I nod and smile and hear it out, all while getting ready to go out for the run I’m damn well going to do anyway. So it goes like this:

My brain: But this sofa is so comfortable! We don’t have to go out.
Me, changing into running clothes: Okay.
My brain: It’ll be so far, and it’s so cold outside. And what if this week’s too hard, hmmm? What if this week’s too hard and we just fail?
Me, tying back hair: Yup, that would be bad.
My brain: There’s just no good reason to go outside into all that weather, and end up out of breath and exhausted for no real benefit. I rest my case.
Me, walking out of the door: Indeed.

So I tried to apply this to my brain objecting mid-run, too, by just letting it rant and tuning it out rather than try to bribe it with “only a few more minutes!”. That seemed to work quite well; as soon as I wasn’t thinking about how much further I had to run, and how that was forever and I was clearly going to die, I started running much more easily. Very glad of an interesting world of outside distractions; I doubt I’d ever manage this on a treadmill.

Also, I found out today that my running speed is consistently about 10 minutes per mile now, so I’m running at the same pace I’d be doing if I was doing the Couch to 5k programme by distance rather than time. This is much faster than I thought I was going, and gives me plenty of leeway to slow right down if – when – I’m finding Saturday’s 20-minute run tough.

Which I will. Because it’s twenty minutes of non-stop running. And even though I know this is possible, and that the real block to finishing is mental rather than physical, I also know that my mind is pretty powerful and really doesn’t think twenty minutes is doable right now. We’ll see.

Are both complete.

Week 3 felt a little like… well, not quite like cheating, but definitely somewhere in cheating’s general timezone. Although the time spent actually running was the same as in week 2, the overall length of each session was much shorter, to the point where finishing the session felt like skipping out halfway through.

Day 2 of Week 3 made up for a shorter timespan by turning the weather up to some ‘cataclysmic’ setting you don’t usually see outside of hurricanes. It was raining a little when I set out, big cold splashy drops of rain that didn’t seem like they’d keep it up very long, and I stuck to my usual weather-related running resolution (if you wait for good weather in Glasgow, you’ll only run three times a year) and kept going anyway.

By the end of the first 90-second run, I noticed that people’s umbrellas were dragging them along like sails in the really-quite-strong-now wind. By the end of the next – three minutes – I was soaked to the skin, the only other people outside were sprinting to get under shelter as quickly as they could, and if it hadn’t been just as far to go back as to go on I’d have done the same myself. The final two runs took me over the top of a hill, running right into the wind with the rain so hard it hurt. It felt like all the forces of Mordor were trying to stop me finishing that run – and damned if I was going to let all the forces of Mordor beat me. I doubt I made any new speed records with the wind fighting me every step of the way, but dammit, I made it home with all the runs done.

The third day of week 3 was uneventful; the first three-minute run still felt a little harder than anything that had come before, but I wasn’t tired at the end of it. I was still worried about week 4, though, and the jump in run lengths: from 90-second and 3-minute runs to 3- and 5-minute runs, on a longer route.

And indeed, week 4, day 1 did not go so well.

The first three minutes was fine, easier than I’d expected it to be, and the five-minute run that followed wasn’t so bad either. I can definitely feel a difference in how long it takes me to run before getting out of breath, or having my leg muscles start filing official complaints, and that’s quite a satisfying feeling. But by the second half of the session, I’d made a wrong turn before thinking about it, and decided not to bother turning round and doubling back on myself when I did. That was fine to start off with, a steep route down to the river that took me off the roads for the first time – and then the path started to go uphill again, just in time for the final five-minute run. Uphill, and uphill, and uphill. A gentle slope at first, but one that turned into a really steep road just as I was starting to wonder whether I’d even be able to manage another five-minute run on the flat. But I was determined to keep running, no matter how slowly or laboriously – and it wasn’t a tenth as difficult as I thought it would be, not even when I reached the top of that hill and turned right into another one. I was completely out of breath by the time the run was over – but I wasn’t walking, either.

After that, days 2 and 3 were fine – tough, but absolutely doable. It’s week 5 that worries me now, with the jump from 5-minute runs at the beginning of the week to an uninterrupted 20-minute run at the end. The fear!

The schedule for runs this week:
- warmup walk of five minutes
- 90-second run
- 90-second walk
- 3-minute run
- 3-minute walk
- 90-second run
- 90-second walk
- 3-minute run
- final cooldown walk.

So it’s the same amount of running as last week, just more condensed.

Three minutes wasn’t the killer I feared it would be, although the first one was uphill – not a steep slope, but a slope all the same – and my legs were really feeling it by the end. The second was mostly on the flat and much easier. I think my calf muscles are going to ache tomorrow, though!

Speaking of which, my knees still hurt a bit. Not all the time, not even that badly, and it’s mostly gone after the first few steps of running, but I’m dubious.

This week was much shorter than the previous two, and that was sort of disappointing. I’d have liked to be out there for longer. Still, there are only two more runs of Week 3 to go, and then Week 4 is back to over 30 minutes again. I’m planning a slightly different route for Week 4, to take account of the extra time – and, hopefully, to give me some new scenery to look at when the 5-minute runs start hurting…

I’m really, really pleased with how well Week 2 went. By Day 3 I’d really got the hang of pacing myself so I could breathe easily while running (helped hugely by having to slow right down to weave through all the people on a very busy Byres Road). At the end of the final run, I could absolutely have kept going; I was even sort of disappointed it was all over so soon. It’s probably for the best that it was, though, since I’ve noticed a few aches and pains hanging around in my shins and my knees and that’s something I’d rather not push, oh yes indeed.

It’s grey out there, though. Grey and full of puddles. I like being outside anyway, even when it’s going dark and everyone I jog past is wearing three parkas and a hat, but I’m very much looking forward to longer days and lighter evenings. 2011 will probably be the only year I’ve ever actually welcomed the clocks going forward in the spring.

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.