Tag Archives: running

Goal Setting, Health/Fitness

Training

I post this, not to say how great I am, but as encouragement to all of you. I think sometimes we focus too much on the end goal, and not enough on the process that got us there.

I have completed 2 half-marathons. I have also trained for 2 half-marathons.

Which one of those sentences is more impressive? Running/walking 13.1 miles on the day of the race, or all the miles that led up to that?

Obviously, for a long time I focused on the races. My goal for my second one was to cut my time by about half an hour (wanted to be under 3 hours). I ended up cutting it by 25 minutes which I decided was close enough. 😉

Then I asked myself if I was actually in better shape for the second one, or did I just pace better, push myself harder, . . . the questions go on.

(And yes, to anyone who knows anything about racing, I know that people run *marathons* in less time than it took me for a half. I know it’s not an impressive time. But I finished. TWICE.)

Now I’ve realized that although of course it’s nice to have a medal and a brag-worthy finishing time, it says a lot about me that I put in all those training miles over the months beforehand.

I stuck with it, and that’s something to be proud of.

2018 ~ I know I’m not *quite* over the finish line here, but it shows my time.
2019~ I had read an article about great finish line photos, so I was trying for an awesome jump over the finish line. I think the camera missed it. 😛
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Fitness Gains

Last week I told you about my recent experiences with HIIT. Also last week, I shaved almost 3 minutes off my time for 5K! I don’t know that it was entirely an improvement in fitness, I think it was partially better pacing, but it still felt GREAT!

Something I haven’t mentioned here yet is my goal to do a pull-up (hopefully more than 1 eventually). It’s can be difficult for me to know how to track progress, because I’ve been working on this goal for a long time and I still can’t do my first pull-up. BUT, I can definitely lower myself a LOT slower on my negatives, and I can pull myself up part way.

Have you gotten your first pull-up yet? Or are you still trying? What are your tips? Tell me in the comments! 🙂

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Health/Fitness

Experiences with HIIT

I’ve been interested in High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, for a couple years now, ever since I read Martin Gibala’s book “The One Minute Workout” (it’s really a 10 minute workout, but the book is great, I highly recommend it).

I haven’t been doing it consistently though. One reason was because I wasn’t sure how to incorporate it into training for longer distances like the half marathon. Since it was my first one, I decided to stick with the basics.

But right now I’m not signed up for any future races, and I have some time to work on other things, like my speed.

So I turned back to HIIT. I am blessed to have a couple of other women to run with, which has been wonderful for accountability.* Not just for getting out there, because I was pretty good about that, at least on nice days, 😉 but I’m really thankful for the push to try harder once I’m out there.

We’ve been doing a workout from Gibala’s book called “Basic Training” which is basically 3 minutes of running hard, and then 3 minutes of walking, for about half an hour (but one of my running companions decided we should increase the workout so we were covering a whole 5K).

The first couple hard intervals aren’t that bad, but I usually end up walking about halfway through the last few.

However, last monday I ran ALL of them!!! It was a great feeling. 🙂 I think part of it was that I paced myself better and didn’t go so all out in the beginning, but I hope that in time it will lead to real gains in fitness and speed.

Stay tuned to find out 😉

(We also recently found a track at a local high school and timed ourselves running a mile. We each did it at our own pace, and we plan to retry it after a month or so to see how our times have changed after all this training.)

*If you don’t have anyone to run with, I encourage you to try what I did and take advantage of one of the many local neighborhood groups that are springing up online. I used an off-shoot of our Buy Nothing group on Facebook, but you could also try NextDoor, et cetera. 🙂

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