The perils of Thanksgiving

This past weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada, and we went to visit the inlaws in Saskatoon. Despite being out of town and having plenty of other people around the house, I managed to fit in a couple of runs while there, upping my distance to 6.48k and 6.72k respectively (links are to the Runkeeper activity pages for those runs.

I'm quite pleased to see some of the updates to Runkeeper - it now allows selective map sharing for activities, which is a feature that I requested a while ago. It allows me to share my runs via the web, but lets me limit which maps are viewable. I'd rather not share my exact address with the world, and sharing a GPS map of my runs would do just that - as with most runners, the start and end points of my runs are at my house.

Runkeeper now has a publicly-viewable dashboard for each user, which is a pretty useful feature.

The bad news is that the combination of turkey, wine, and desserts added four pounds to my waistline in three days. I know that only some of that weight gain is 'real' - a lot of it is just the normal day-to-day variation in weight - but I need to cut down for the next week to bring my weight back to target. Nothing dramatic, just a few calories cut here and there.

I have some commitments that prevent me from running today, but I'll definitely hit the pavement tomorrow.

Blog neglect

At the same time that I've neglected running for the past week, I've neglected this blog.

I'm still alive, and I'm still doing rung 36 of the lifetime fitness ladder every morning (545 steps running in place, 70 jumping jacks, 49 forward bends, 39 sit-ups, 56 prone lifts, and 30 pushups) along with around 60 reps of some bicep curls.

I'll be hitting the pavement for a run today, and am hoping that I haven't lost any cardiovascular ability in the week I haven't ran... Now that I've completed the C25k program, I'm looking for a new challenge to work toward. Perhaps a 5k-to-10k transition. I'd love to run a 5k race, but I've missed the boat for this fall season - I'll definitely be entering one in the spring!

Back running, completed C25k

My last C25k run (week 9, day 3 - 30min of non-stop running) was completed yesterday, and I had the privilege of running with public service blogger and colleague Nick Charney. Nick's an inspiration for me professionally as he is amazingly nimble at navigating the bureaucracy where we work, but he's also an inspiration on the fitness side of things - he recently completed a half-marathon and has only been running for four months or so!

The run itself consisted of a few laps around a nearby urban lake, totalling 5.29k. At about 4.2k, my phone rang and I had to take the call. I forgot that Runkeeper pauses its recording if a phone call is answered, and forgot to restart it afterward, so the last seven minutes or so of the run didn't get mapped.

After about 10 days of not running at all, it felt great to get outdoors again. Summer's gone and winter is upon us... I'll have to get some better running clothes for cold weather - the sweat pants and hoodie worked well enough yesterday, but they won't be that helpful once the snow flies.

Downtime

I'm currently resting and recovering for a few days, so I won't be blogging much about my fitness progress. For the time being I'm going to be a couch potato and enjoy it for a little bit.

I should be back up and running by the first week of October.

The final week!

It really doesn't feel like it's been 9 weeks since I started this whole running thing, but I'm already on the last week of C25k. Of course, there had to be a hurdle in the way - I'm going to have to take a break from exercise starting in a few days (medical reasons) but I'm hoping to be back up and running (literally) within about 10 days or so.

In the meantime my exercise will consist of sitting on the couch, watching movies, reading books, and playing video games. Given the choice, I actually would prefer heading outside and running!

I've hit 6k, week 8 complete!

As of my run today, I managed a distance of 6k. About 1k of this run was the warmup/cooldown, but I still think it's pretty impressive! I'll start week 9 on Tuesday, which consists of a 30-minute run of about 5k in distance.

Week 8 day 2

I'm on to week 8, day 2 of Couch-to-5k tonight, with a 5.91k run. The weather has been unseasonably warm around here. Normally we'd have daytime highs of around 17C in mid-September, and it was 24C for my run tonight!

Now that the run is out of the way, I'm going to have a delicious Friday Night Feast from a local market, along with some excellent red wine! Good times!