Running the wrong way
A few months ago I started using the Couch to 5k app on my iPhone. The idea of the Couch to 5k programme is to slowly improve your running ability from “crap” to being able to run 5k without stopping. Each week, you spend more of your routine running and less of it walking, and the app gives you audio reminders of when you should do each.
Anyway, it’s a good way to start out, especially if you’re as morbidly unfit as me. The problem is that in order to keep up with the programme, you’re meant to run three times a week. I am much too undisciplined to run that much, so ultimately I ended up cutting myself a lot of slack, and wondering exactly which “week” I was meant to be doing.
So after 12 weeks, I was still on Week 4 or something similarly unchallenging… until last week, when I went for a run with much fitter flatmate. A 5k run. Which it turned out I could actually do, all the way through, without stopping.
My point is that, at some juncture, the supporting structure of the system became a weird constraint. And I did what I used to do as a kid with Unreal Tournament, which is keep it easy and see what outrageous margin I could win by, rather than scrape by at some higher level. I ended up running faster and faster for the running portions, rather than trying to run for longer. But now I’ve learned my lesson, and also discovered that I have more stamina than I thought I did. Nice.
Couch to 5k: gets you off the couch, but not necessarily all the way to 5k. Unless you add a multiplayer, social gaming component in the form of a sporty friend.
