gretchen says

One of the issues I’ve had with learning to run is figuring out the endurance piece. I just can’t seem to bust through the 2nd 3 minute run in week 3 without being in a lot of pain. A 3 minute run! WTF? So I asked my good friend Jeanne for help, and her thought was that I was going too fast. (haha. Ha.) She told me to aim for 12:30 on my running intervals, so I went into my app (iSmoothRun) and instead of using my C25K intervals, I set up a workout of repeating intervals of 2 minutes running, 1:30 recovery, repeated 11 times, which I figured would get me through my 3.25 mile route. (I went off-plan with C25K way back, when I opted to always do 5K instead of a 30 minute workout) I’ve been doing that all week, and it’s still been sucky, and I’ve still had pain and had to walk ten steps or so (especially on the uphill intervals) but today!!!! Today I did the whole thing, ran every second of my running intervals, EVEN THE UPHILLS (and in fact, the longest uphill ended up being one of my fastest intervals? Not sure I believe that, but that’s what the voice in my headphones and my run log says…) and most importantly: I didn’t hurt. I felt like a million bucks.

My plan is to repeat this on Thursday, and then do one of the C25K workouts on Sunday, and then next week nudge up my running intervals by 15 seconds, or maybe 30? and then tackle that endurance level (and I almost put that in quotes, because seriously, running for 2 and a half minutes straight is an embarrassingly low bar for endurance, but it’s MY bar, and it is certainly more than I could do before!) and then keep increasing my interval time, and decreasing the recovery time, until some day, I am just running. And today was a tiny but also kinda big step in that direction.