Go For It!! Yeah!

This past weekend, while having dinner and a few drinks with some friends, the topic of recreational running came up. Our friends (Josh and Chrissy, Mary and Daniel) are all at various stages of running abilities and they were comparing running stories. Several drinks in, while they were talking about various marathons they were/have been training for, Brian and I began to say "Why aren't we doing something like this? We're so out of shape. We should do this to!"

The next day Josh says to us "You do realize you committed to running a half marathon this fall?"
umm.... maybe he doesn't realize that I get winded when I climb the stairs at my house?

But Brian and I need to do something, that much is very clear. I shouldn't get winded walking up the stairs. I'm not doing tae kwon do any longer for so many different reasons and I miss having that something for exercise. Brian was a runner in high school, and said this past year that he was going to start running again. But he never did, and now we are both quite out of shape.
So we really are going to start running. There are so many reasons for us to do this- we are out of shape, we need to lose weight, we need physical exercise, it's cheaper to do this than tae kwon do, our friends are doing it (peer pressure, right?), Brian's familiar with what all is involved in long distance running... I can keep going but the point is Brian and I have put together a running program. We're not thinking marathons, not even a 5K run. We're starting small and going to work our way up.

I found this on runnersworld.com and we are modifying it for my crazy night schedule. This is a program to get you to run for a full 30 min with no walking breaks in just 8 weeks. My goal is to do this in about 10 weeks. It gives you 1 day of rest each week, and there are some weeks where I'll need 2 because of my long shifts. It will be a work in progress and I'll be treading a fine line between an excuse of "I'm too tired!" and the safety concern of "I'm too tired". I don't want to fall off the sidewalk because I fell asleep while running.

We are trying to follow the pointers of this article- one thing we have done is to write out a schedule of when we are going to run. I know everyday I'm going to run from today to Labor Day (mostly...there could be some tweaking due to the aforementioned tiredness). The article also said that an easy 30 min run (approx 2 miles in 30 min) will maintain your weight, and maybe you'll start to loose. We know that motivation will be hard when we aren't going to be seeing many results weight wise until we have been running for 10 weeks. I'm hoping that by posting what we are doing that we will be held accountable for keeping up with the running.

So here goes:

Today we walked for 2 minutes and ran for 1, x 10 for a total of 30 mintues. I was proud that was able to do that but by the last 2 "runs" I was moving very very slow. I was moving my feet in such a way that I was "running" but could have been moving faster if I had still been walking still. It's progress!!