Midwife, how many hours a day do you exercise? You mentioned earlier about sparring for an hour and kick-cardio for an hour, as well as spending time on the eliptical. That's all in one day. I just can't imagine spending hours and hours a day exercising. I could never make that amount of time or stick with that intense of a porgram. Just wondering....

Got my wk6d1 run in. Really tried to push myself by running a bit faster and also adding a breif sprint for 30 seconds at the end of each running interval. Felt really good. I have never done any kind of sprinting before. Still having a bit of a concern about my calves cramping...any one have any ideas?

eadaevenp - have you checked out the nikewomen site? They have some pretty decent training programs including one for a 10 k or even a half or full marathon.

lucky - bet that circuit training is going to be awesome for you, plus crunches a good workout into a little bit of time...good going.

helen - that is a pretty good pic!

anne - congrats on your aquathlon...

webweevil - I probably would not mess with the walking recovery time...just try to run a little slower...the program picks up pretty quickly

Hi Webweevil, I messed up my post--my number 3 has been sticking on my keyboard. I ran 3 miles and it took me 33 minutes. Yesterday I did a 28 minute "wt loss" workout on the elliptical plus a 5 minute cool-down, skipped the sparring and did about 50 minutes of kickboxing. I average about 30-90 minutes of exercise a day, plus a total rest day each week. The longest distance I have run is 4 miles, so I have a long way to go to work up to the half-marathon I have my eye on. My next goal is to incorporate weight lifting. Part of my kick boxing classes includes pushups and situps...I have a lot of work to do, but also a lot of time to do it in!

A half marathon isn't so bad once you can get to 4 miles, honest... Once you can run for half an hour at a time it's a lot easier to build up your distance than it was to start in the first place, or that's what I found at least.

Which reminds me, I have a 13 miler planned for Sunday...

Thanks all for the encouragement and your imput! :hug:

6 miles at marathon pace this morning. I really need to find a better way of doing paced runs though, the only way I can really track and maintain my speed is on the treadmill at the moment. It's OK in races when there are distance markers, but apart from that I really need the display on the treadmill. The problem is it just gets so boring, and if my paced runs get any longer I'll run out of time to do them because the treadmill only goes up to an hour. Still, I figure it's worth the boredom to do a paced run occasionally so I get to know what my target pace feels like.

5 miles today...At my marathon pace of 12 minute miles! Hahaha!!

YP1, could you get one of those GPS watch thingies to monitor your speed and distance?

I could, but running on the treadmill is cheaper... I can't really justify the financial outlay, no matter how useful it would be.

Oh my!! It's HOT!! I thought jogging at 9:30am would be okay, but boy was I wrong. It was already nearly 90 degrees. It's not so much the heat that bothers me, but the humidity was horrendous!! I'm going to have to start waking up early, early, early, because this weather is going to kill me otherwise!!

Okay, sorry about that rant! My parents are coming to visit me later this afternoon and staying until tomorrow. I'll try to wake up before everyone else is awake tomorrow to get some exercise in. Otherwise it won't get done.

Everyone seems to be doing so well. Keep it up!

Helen, I think it would be difficult to track your pace. The only thing that I can think of besides using gps is maybe determining your own mile markers. Have you seen some of the websites that you can trace your path and it will calculate your mileage? Or...how about a high school track? I don't know. Tough one.

Helen -- Here is a site http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/ that may help, find your country and city/town and you measure your distances on there before going out... worth a try... Let us know how it goes...

I've done horribly running this week... I'm working full time, I'm not used to it, the schedule is all screwed up... I've only run 12k this week... I'm going to try to get up early this week and at least go out for a 5k first thing... I've gotta do something!! Sorry about the rant!

I've just been out for an 11.6 mile run. It wasn't my best, to be honest, I seemed to walk a lot of it and just couldn't get into the right state of mind. Physically I was OK, but mentally I just couldn't be bothered to actually run bits of it. I still managed to get round in just about 2 hours, so I was still doing about 10:20 per mile, but I just know I could have run better. Part of my "excuse" is that it was a new route down footpaths in some countryside just outside the city, so I was constantly checking my map, climbing over stiles etc, but still, I feel a bit disappointed with myself. Ah well, it's still time on my feet, and it's the same distance whether I sprint it or walk it, so it's not all bad.

You are being too hard on yourself YP1. 11.6 miles is still 11.6 miles!!! Walk or run, you covered some distance and saw some new sights. :carrot:

Today was day 2 of C25K week one. I must say, it didn't get any easier from day one to day two. After the 20 minutes was up, I continued another ten minutes of walking to keep me from cramping up.

I only did 7.97K today and I feel pretty good about that, even at 7am the heat kills me!...Helen you did great, you're being too hard on yourself !

Thanks for posting that website, Ilene! I plotted out my long run that I had guessed was 5 miles and it was 4.9 miles. Not too bad! It was great fun for the kids to see a satellite view of our house too...

3.8 miles this am, a lot of it uphill, on a sandy path. I do not like running in sand although I hear it is better for the joints.

Helen, don't be so hard on yourself. We're all entitled to a crappy run once in a while. It's just too bad it happened on your long run day.

Ilene, the heat was killing me this morning too. I drank 2x as much water this morning as I did last weekend, when I ran further.

webweevil, got job on getting out there for day 2. I used to walk for a few minutes after finishing too.

I too had a tough-ish long run this morning. My legs were tired from walking a lot yesterday as well as a short run pushing my 2 dds in the stroller. And it's our first heat wave of the year so far, so I woke up hot and sweaty to start the run. I still managed 20.7km/11.8 miles at a6:26/10:22 pace. Which is amusingly slower than last weekend's 28k run in the rain (it felt tougher too). I took a hillier route this weekend and it was 29C/84F with humidity at 8am (I got home around 8:45) and almost no wind. It's during those tougher days that I realize that running is as much mental as physical.