3 months into this 8-week program...

[djplong]

I knew it wasn't going to be easy.  More often, now, it's taking several times to get past a given workout.  I still track the stats and I still get encouragement from them but there have been obstacles..

 

- Some kind of lung/sinus infection laid me up for a few days.

- Something happened to my knee a few weeks ago and only now has really stopped hurting but it seems to have left my right leg a little weak.

- Vacation had me go a week without REAL workouts (but lost weight WALKING all over DC/Maryland/Gettysburg) regardless of the knee problem.

 

So here I am, 3 months after re-starting the program and I'm stuck on W6D3.  The most frustrating part is that W5D3's 20:00 jog was done a while ago - I even did an extra couple of minutes which SHOULD mean that the W6D3 23:00 job *should* be no big deal but there's always something stopping me.  Yesterday it was the return of lower back pain (possibly because of the physical therapy I had the day before). 

 

Still I'm not letting that defeat me.  I knew, 3 minutes in, that I wasn't going to make 23:00 so I decided to turn it into intervals and deviated from my normal paths at the park and took the rather hilly nature trail through the woods.  Walk when I had to, jog when I could and I ended up a little over 5km in 44 minutes (warmup/cooldown walks included).

 

Instead of giving up, I find myself getting angry and frustrated when it doesn't happen or I inexplicably gain weight when I haven't been eating much - making me that much more determined to do better next time.  I always try to take a lesson from the 'failures'.  Yesterday's lesson was that I probably don't run well later in the day and after the PT (which had me doing new exercises for the first time) I most likely should have had some kind of interval session ready to go instead of the "all in one" session that is W6D3.

 

I'm wondering if other people have that moment in the first few minutes of a jog where the calves, ankles and knees all start saying "Wait, what?  What the heck - AGAIN?!?!?".  After a couple of minutes, that seems to die down and it got me to thinking that maybe my 'warmup' would be a couple of mini-intervals of jog/walk just to get the legs back into gear.

[Batgirl]

My biggest doubts come in the first half of the workout. I'm only on W3, so my mind doesn't have much time to argue myself out of it before the next walk period comes to "cool" my brain. After each workout, I always feel good & that feeling lasts and lasts. On my off days I try to remind myself how good I'm doing. I also try to notice that I don't have those doubtful thoughts regularly. I'm going to work on a good playlist to keep my mind at least half occupied during my workout, to see if I can't turn off those fearful thoughts.