Graduation Day

Huge progress over this weekend although today's 'recovery run' was harder than it should have been but that was my fault because I can't count!.

Yesterday's instructions read, jog (read lope) for 4 minutes followed by a 1 minute walk, 6 times making a total of 30 minutes.  Now I had to go out with Andrew yesterday because my running buddy was at work and he can't count like me, he can't run either but luckily he can walk as fast as I can lope so we managed.  At some point as my brain became starved of oxygen I believed there were eight five minutes in half an hour and Andrew didn't argue with me.  Imagine my devastation when at what I believed to be 29 minutes and despite my 'belief' my 'inner battle' and my 'dogged determination' my legs simply said 'eerrrrr nope - not doing this any more'.  For the first time in three weeks I had failed to achieve my target.  It was some time later when I had just about managed to get my breathing back under control that I found myself in front of the kitchen clock counting how many 5 minutes there are in half an hour - 6!  I went back to my instructions and sure enough I was aiming for 6 not 8, so I wasn't 1 minute under my goal I was in fact 9 minutes over which was possibly a step too far.

Anyway, by far the biggest leap forward this weekend was that today I did the 'recovery run' by myself, I can't begin to tell you just how huge that is, I was really dreading this step but it was OK - no one laughed, well only the ducks in that quaky sort of way that they do every time we go past the pond.  I didn't get attacked and only one dog barked at me and he was behind a fence so that was OK.

It is now time to graduate onto the marathons 24 week training programme.  Tomorrow I have to jog for 15 minutes which is quite scary but I will give it my best shot.  I do think I'm making progress but it's slow - very, very slow.