Week 4 – Couch to 5K – My Experience

Hello! Sorry I’ve not been as active on the blog recently. The ‘i’ key has fallen off my laptop keyboard so I’ve been sorting out a repair for it and I have to send it off tomorrow. It just makes blogging that bit more difficult, and that has affected my motivation to blog. Do you ever have those days? Although I feel great once I’ve done it, so that helps!

Anyway, I said earlier I was doing the Couch to 5K app and I blogged about weeks 1 – 3 of Couch to 5K. Today (well, technically yesterday), I completed the final run of week four. Here’s how I got on.

Firstly, it’s been so hot here (in England, I know!). It has been like 27 degrees (or 80 degrees fahrenheit). doing any sort of exercise in that heat really makes me feel unwell for the rest of the day. Maybe I’m not aclimatised to it but I just feel headachy and dizzy, even if I have some water beforehand. It threw me a bit with regards to when I should be doing the runs. Usually I go at lunch but that’s when the sun is at its hottest. I don’t get up early enough to exercise in the morning before work, so I’ve found myself going for a run in the evening when the weather is cooler. The only downside is now I’ve lost my motivation to get ready for work in the mornings, as I know I’ll have to change into my gym gear to go for a run!

Week 4 Couch To 5K – How I Got On

Anyway, moving on. Week 4 of Couch to 5K felt like a significant step up from the other weeks. The longest running interval we had in Week 3 was three minutes. In Week 4 that’s what we start out with. Bam straight into a three minute run. The rests are shorter too. After three minutes of running you get a 90 second walk, and then five minutes of runnng and 2 1/2 minutes of walking (repeat that twice).

Week 4 was noticeably tougher. I didn’t find myself too much out of breath as the breaks were very welcome, but my legs felt quite tired. The whole session was a bit longer too. It was 31 minutes in total, which included 16 minutes of running. This week was also a bit buggy. For some reason during the walk interval just before my last run, it completely reset and started at the introduction for Week 4 Run 1! The first time it happened I thought I had pressed the wrong button, but it happened for all three runs in Week 4. It was a bit frustrating as I was walking and not taking much notice of the timer on the app. It usually announces when you have to start running and I realised it hadn’t for a while and looked down and it had reset to the beginning. Luckily you can skip to certain points during the session so I just fast forwarded to the part I knew I was at, but it involved a bit of guess work.

As always, the coaches are really encouraging. Although the runs were longer, I daresay I actually enjoyed them. Well, Run 1 came as a bit of a shock, but I really enjoyed Run 2! Run 3 not so much as it was much hotter even in the evening, but I felt more confident in my running.

I used to think before that if I had to walk during a run I had somehow failed and that it was a rubbish run. The Couch to 5K app is slowly changing my perspective. I feel the Couch to 5K app has helped me use the recovery walk constructively as a way to build on stamina, if that makes sense?

Now onto Week 5!

Do you have any tips with regards to exercising in the heat?