Personal computing discussed
Moderators: askfranklin, renee, emkubed, Captain Ned
derFunkenstein wrote:Couch to 5k seems like the obvious choice. There's nothing beyond the 3 weekly workouts intended to get you worked up to a 5k run.
http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml
GuruBill wrote:One last tip to increase your speed. Do shorter runs at higher speed. So, for you, mix in 1km runs at under 6mins. Train your brain to handle the higher speed. Something like this ... 5km, 5km, 1km, 5km, 5km, 1km, 5km, 5km, 2km
Dagwood wrote:Now very few people I know have the patience or time for a 30 minute stretch, including myself.
Anomymous Gerbil wrote:Google for something like "Does stretching before exercise prevent injury?". Counter-intuitively, the answer from randomised controlled trials and reviews of other RCTs says "No", and that's been known for quite a long time now.
Dagwood wrote:the routine was a mile jog as a warm-up then followed by 30 minutes of stretching, before we did anything.
paulWTAMU wrote:You don't have to bike, but you should find some things you can enjoy and can do for over half an hour which get your heart rate up. To get your heart rate up enough when walking on level ground may require going at an unnatural pace which strains your muscles in funny ways. Hiking hilly/irregular terrain (or stairs, but those get boring fast) would do fine. Finding a sport to play regularly (weekly casual pickup games of soccer or ultimate, for instance) would do it too.I hate cycling.
paulWTAMU wrote:Ouch! To get used to regulating your pace a little, find a track, wear a watch, and check your pace every 200m (or whatever an easy mark is given the track length if it's not a standard 400m track). Of course most of the time you'll probably want to get more variety than running on the track allows, but it shouldn't take too long to get a feel for the pace, and it will make things a lot easier once you have a feel for it.I cannot self regulate pace worth a damn. I just don't know how fast I'm going. . . My first mile took between 7 and 8 minutes, the next 2.1 miles took 30-31 minutes
PetMiceRnice wrote:
You can also figure out mileage checkpoints for some favorite routes off the track (google maps can be useful here) and use those to pace yourself, but again, you should be able to get a basic feel for the pace pretty quickly and you don't have to worry about being exact.
paulWTAMU wrote:edit; this is a kick in the nuts. The markers on the walking path and the city's parks and recs website give the distance as .74 miles, but google maps shows it being .6 miles around the path. Gaaaaaa
paulWTAMU wrote:ludi's idea for getting a more accurate read sounds good, and you can do without a track. But I just wanted to mention a possibility- high school or university tracks are usually free and open to the public most of the time, and though I guess you may not have a college track any closer than West Texas A&M, a quick google search shows 6+ high school/jr high tracks in Amarillo.that sounds like what I'll do. We dont' have a plethora of free tracks around town, and I don't want to drop the cost of a gym membership to get a track. But we usually use one city park that's got a 3/4 mile path around it; I can choose what section to sprint on and use google maps to get some distance.
paulWTAMU wrote:that sounds like what I'll do. We dont' have a plethora of free tracks around town. But we usually use one city park that's got a 3/4 mile path around it.
Good to know on the pedometers; I guess I'll get a stopwatch and practice.
derFunkenstein wrote:2.) I thought my distance would improve with week 2, but instead my distances aren't any better. Last week each day I went about 1.25 miles (walk/run intervals only; including the warm-up and cool-down walks put it at about 1.75mi). This week the two days I've done I've also gone about 1.25 miles. So I'm frustrated, but I'm going to keep going. My goal is to run a 5K on Labor Day weekend.