Couch to 5k: Week 2 Day 3

Here it is the last day of week 2 on my Couch to 5k week run up. I'm doing well in spite of the break I took due to work being profoundly weird for 4 days.

My running is a good thing. I'm not good at it yet. I won't lie. I run and walk for half an hour and I think I run too fast because I run faster than I can talk comfortably. That's not what I'm supposed to do. The problem is on treadmills I can see how fast I'm going and I pay more attention to things like my speed and pace than I do to my breathing. That's stupid. I need to learn to run for comfort and not for speed, especially right now. The thing is, I can't find any good sites that will tell me what a good speed is for me. Somewhere should be some sort of average speed for a 40 year old male beginning runner that says "If you're running 6 miles an hour you're fine. 7 is a bit too fast, and 5 is too slow." But no. I can't find anything that says that. What I find instead are sites that say things like "Don't worry about it!"

Here's another annoying thing. So many sites give times NOT in miles per hour, but in minutes per mile. What the hell?!? Where will I find that anywhere else?!? I don't have a mile measured out that I walk and then time it. I have a watch. It tells me when I've walked a given unit of time. *sigh* I need to memorize the conversions. 5 mph is 12 minutes per mile, 6 mph is 10 minutes per mile, and 7 mph is 8.5 minutes per mile.  Really good racers run 4 minute miles.

Running form is something I wish I had a trainer for. Whenever I focus on fitness either diet or exercise I'm always surprised at how often about.com shows up at the top of my search results. There is some good running stuff over there, and this video about proper running form is helpful.

Today I ran...

Three days of running so far... not consecutive, but three times in a row, and on schedule.

I hope this is the beginning of a habit. Today's treadmill distance was much further than the previous one. I need to find out what good 5k running speeds are, and what a good 'brisk walk' speed is. I suspect I'm running too slow and walking too fast.

One of the things I'm missing due to running is computer time. I might very well work on getting my book on the treadmill with me so that I can combine running and reading on the treadmill so I can use some of my reading time for computer time. I'm not sure, but I've got to do something, as my running time increases I'm going to need to find more time in the day! Perhaps my newly highly oxygenated blood will increase my productivity to the point where I'm faster at everything I do so I won't need as much time.