I’ve gone through the Couch to 5k program a couple of times before and I started up the program again a few weeks ago. If you’re not familiar with the program, you can check out the information at this site. It basically takes you from a starting point which assumes you are not a runner and works you up to being able to run a 5k. It’s a 9 week schedule of running 3 times a week.
Today was day 1 of week 3 for me. This week marks the point where the walking and running distances/times are equal. The first two weeks had more walking than running. Starting next week, the running distances/times will be longer than the walking distances/times. Every week, the running times increase and the walking times decrease. Today’s run went well. It was challenging, but it didn’t seem much more difficult than last week because I only had 4 runs and only 2 of them were the longer duration.
During these early weeks, when there are lots of different intervals of running and walking, it is much more complicated to calculate out the yards than it is to aim for being able to keep running for a certain time interval. I’m looking forward to making it to the point where I’m basically concentrating on trying to run a certain distance. I just pulled up Google Earth and used the ruler too to draw a path to figure out how I would do a 5k run in our little town. I can’t wait until I’m strong enough to run it!