life with booyaa

no, booyaa hasn't turned his hand to petty theft, i just like the sound of it. if you don't know what i'm talking about then go and find out.

yesterday was week 2, run 3 of my training programme and i went out with boo, who was going on a long run round bushy park. so we did my 20-minute jog-walk session, then i turned round and came back and he carried on running for another 10 miles or so.

rather than saunter the not-quite-two-miles home, i decided to try to continue as far as i could. i left slightly longer between the running stints, but for a couple of them i racked up some speed and really pushed myself. i was very proud of my progress. and i managed to run/walk a total of 4.4 miles. and all that with no inhaler. phenomenal progress.

nike+ challenges

i uploaded my run to the nike+ site and watched my progress on the two challenges i'm participating in. the first, the 'veg vs carni rematch' is the whole reason booyaa is veggie this month - so he can score miles for the veggies. after the first 14 days the teams are evened up, meaning the veggies who outnumbered the carnies were elminated from the bottom of the list up. and although i wasn't at the bottom, i was among the 13 or so veggies who were knocked out. but that's ok, i didn't expect to compete with the kind of people who run 30+ miles a week...

my other challenge, which was boo's suggestion, is a beginner's challenge. at the end of the first day of the challenge the leaderboard was looking like this:

yep. that's me. right at the top there :D

big fat cheats

the next day the story was very different as there appear to be a number of cheats in the challenge. they're either not beginners according to their mileage (already racked up 500+ miles) or running extremely fast (sub 9 minute miles - unlikely for a beginner) or doing more than one-hour workouts, which is against the rules. god i hate cheats. and why do they join a challenge when they won't play by the rules? i don't see the point. it's not like you can revel in the glory when you know you cheated. or are there people out there who can? yeah, probably. anyways.

if i can get the challenge organiser to kick out the cheats i might actually stand a chance of being in the top 10 by the end of the challenge, and that would be a great start to my nike+ career ;)

so... i started the beginners' training plan about 3 years ago. ok, so it wasn't quite that long back, it just feels like it. i started a 9 week plan in september last year, and i've just completed week 6. no, my maths is fine, i've just been stuck on week 6, groundhog day-style, for what seems like months. and probably is...

i've repeated one off sessions here and there where there's been a bit of a lapse in training, so that slowed me down. then two weeks in november were crossed off while i was on honeymoon. and in december i got my annual chest infection so didn't run for most of the month. in january i started again, repeating the whole of week 6 to try to get back to where i was in terms of stamina and speed. i have to say i'm really struggling. and mostly it's my own fault. i have really noticed my asthma's worse than it has been for months. it had dramatically improved during spring-summer-autumn last year, and we all know why...

... most of december i ate cooked food, not raw, and now i'm suffering the consequences.

it really is that simple.

tomorrow i'm going to sit down and work out a transition regime for the next 3 months and get a menu plan sorted for the next few weeks, where i can mix and match and be flexible, as i need that if i'm going to stick to it. then i'm going shopping to stock up for the week ahead.

right. i've said it in public, so now i'm committed to it.

oh yes, and i'm going for a run in the morning to try out week 7, run 1 (2.5 miles in 25 minutes) for the first time!

the title of this post is a direct acknowledgement of your patience as i work my way through all the possible puns i can use to name my running posts. thank you.

so... where are we at? well i've finally completed my 9-week training programme (you may remember it's taken me twice as long to get through, as i've done some sections of the programme over and over until i was ready to move on) so that's great news :)

highlights and lowlights

it's been bloody freezing recently with weather warning-inducing gusts of wind. i tell you, running the last half mile of a 30-minute early morning run, straight into icy, 70mph gusts of wind is not something i recommend or enjoy. you just think to yourself "did i really get out of bed to put myself through this?" but the next time you go out you record a personal best. or it's a beautiful sunny morning in the park, you see a young deer trotting through the long grass and other runners say good morning on your way past. you can't beat that.

i won one of the challenges on nike+ too. a 30-day beginners challenge. i kind of won by default as two people were kicked out for not being true beginners just a couple of days before the end, but hey, i'm not complaining :)

i'm now running 30 minutes 3 or 4 times a week, trying to consistently achieve a 5k in under 30 minutes, ready for my first BPTT. my nike+ kit reckons i can do 3.2 miles (just over 5k) in 28 minutes. disappointingly, i've found that the nike+ is wildly inaccurate, in a bad way. we tested it out by running the route of the BPTT on saturday. my nike+ said i'd run 3.5 miles, so it's out by a third of a mile :( of course running a real 5k was much tougher, as it's further than i had got used to. and it took me 33 minutes, so i have a lot of work to do to beat booyaa's first BPTT result of 25.18. hmmm.

exercise-induced asthma is interesting me, as i found it debilitating when i first started running. i tend to still run as fast as my lungs can cope with, but have recently discovered that sometimes my thigh muscles protest when my lungs are actually managing quite well. more about that in a later post, as i intend to do some research. you never know, i might get myself off my daily 'brown' (steroid) inhaler if i discover it's only an exercise thing.

i've also found out a few things about sports bras, running clothes, what to do with your hair and carrying water. so, here's what i've learned.