“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.”

Walter Elliot

So I woke up with my new alarm today at 5 am. I hear the rain outside and for a few minutes, I wonder if I should just stay home today and call it a rest day. After all, it is raining.

But it’s literally day 2 of my new training plan. Day 2, and I’m coming up with excuses to stay home. I didn’t even have a hard time yesterday–I actually enjoyed it!

Here’s a funny story. I downloaded the Couch to 5 K app on my iPhone (and now, as I write this, I realise this is not even the official app… a fact revealed after I google it for linking here). It’s a super shitty app and I was surprised that it looks so bad for a app that promotes a fairly popular training program. Lazy me shrugged it off. I also adopted a try-for-longer-than-I-want-to approach to most things recently as I don’t want to miss out on something great just because I’m an idiot or that my first impression is wrong.

So week 1 day 1 of my C25K training was done incorrectly. I got the warm up part right, but the interval run turned into just me running/jogging for the whole 15 minutes. I was waiting for the app to prompt me to switch from running to walking and then running again, but it never happened.

When I tried the app again this morning, I realised I had to keep the app on screen and the phone screen ON the whole time for it to actually prompt me. What a horrible design feature!! Granted, I’m an idiot for not testing it out more before using it, but still.

I did actually enjoy running the whole way though. I’m not sure if it was because it was the first time I ran in a long time, but it felt good. I didn’t feel tired and I didn’t get stitches in my side like I expected to, so I guess I’m less unfit than I thought I was. The total distance I ran/jogged/walked was at 2.95 K, and I ended up feeling refreshed rather than tired.

Week 1 day 2 today, my legs are a little sore, but nothing horrible like I expected. I also did end up doing the interval training since I left my phone screen on with the app loaded the whole time. The in app trainer also sounded like the announcer in one of those cheap bluetooth headsets–you know the one, the lady with the incredibly faint Chinese accent to her English, telling you what was happening in the most dispassionate tone.

Another program I found online had introduced rest days through out the week, which I’ll be adding to my routine. Tomorrow is another training day and then Thursday I get a rest.

Anyway. Upon further googling, I found the offical Couch25K app here. I’ll download this today and try it out for tomorrow morning and log here about how I go.