Early morning run

I really enjoyed my run this morning. From the start it felt good. I don't remember ever finding a run easy from the beginning before, but this one was. Usually I'm thinking "what am I doing? when can I stop?" for the first five minutes, but today I just ran.

Leanne had me do something different today. We stopped three times during the run for me to do exercises. The first stop involved 10 burpees. Now, if you ever want a serious laugh at 6:10 am in the morning, you should tag along behind me next time. Burpees and me do not go together. Unfortunately, Leanne has this "never say die" attitude, and so I did 10 very uncoordinated burpees. Well, I jumped up in the air 10 times. I scrambled down to the ground 10 times. My feet went away from my hands 10 times and I jumped back towards my hands 10 times. Any one of those combinations may have borne a vague relationship to a burpee, but it was entirely coincidental.

The second lot of exercises were 10 pushups and 10 situps and the last lot involved 15 lunges on each leg. I am the woman who couldn't do a pushup to save her life and whose reaction to the thought of lunges was to immediately develop a serious injury in both knees. Now, 15 lunges is easily achievable and pushups / situps are a push over.

Leanne explained to me that breaking up the run like that makes it harder. Something to do with losing momentum. I thought the exercises were a good chance to get my breath back. Clearly I had it all wrong.

With all of these exercise breaks, we managed to get back to the gym in 28 mins. We do a short warm up walk, run for a bit out and back, sprint the last few metres and then walk back to the gym. When we got back, my immediate question was "how far did the foot pod say we went?" This obsession with stats is a clear sign that I've become a runner. Anyway, we'd covered 3.8 km, which I thought was amazing. I didn't think I'd run that fast, because the run had felt so easy. I was really pleased.

This afternoon's session at the gym wasn't at all planned. I was a bit all over the place with what I wanted to do. There was a 5 km run that started at 6 pm near the lake, but I didn't manage to get myself into town in time to do that. I thought about running at the gym, but when I got off the bus I discovered that my knees were a little tired, so I decided to do my weights program. I've realised that it's much easier when I've worked out what I'm going to do in advance.

I haven't done any alternative cardio lately, so I'm going to make an effort to use the other machines tomorrow morning. The bike and the crosstrainer should be kind to my knees. I've got squash after work, which involves a lot of dashing around and missing the ball, so I will do an easy treadmill session when I get to the gym after that. Squash is likely to be a little competitive tomorrow as there may have been some sledging going on at work.

On Thursday, I will do some interval running in the morning, and some general cardio work in the evening before I go to Body Jam. On Friday, I'll do my weights program in the evening, and I'll probably do a treadmill session in the morning.

I think that's enough planning for one day!