Running With A Friend April 9, 2006
Yesterday at H’s first birthday party, I got talking to a mate (we’ll call him ‘A’) who lives just down the street from me. He has been talking about losing weight and getting fitter for a while now, and has been through a few fads trying to find something that works.
For example, at the start of summer he bought a surf ski with good intentions of taking it paddling every morning. I think he’d been watching the Iron Man races on TV! He stopped after about 3 or 4 weeks, mainly because of the hassle of loading it onto his car, driving to the river, and cleaning it off when he came home. A session on the ski takes 1 to 1.5 hours, and he found that wasn’t sustainable every day of the week.
So he asked me if I’d mind if he tagged along on my jog the next morning. “No problem,” I said, “but you’ve got to be waiting out the front at 5:45 am!” I knew he wanted to come, but I honestly didn’t really expect him to be there. Night-guy is very good at making commitments that morning-guy can’t keep, especially after a few beers!
A is about the same height as me, but he’s roughly 10 kg (22 lbs) heavier than I am. Last December, I was nearly 5 kg (11 lbs) heavier than him, so he knows that whatever I’m doing is working. I think he wanted to pick my brains as much as join me for exercise!
To my surprise, on Sunday morning when I walked out the front door, he was waiting in the driveway!
A isn’t the fittest of people, but that wasn’t a big problem. We decided to just do 60 second run/60 second walk intervals and see how he went. He was able to maintain that pace for much of the 3 km course, occasionally needing to go a bit longer walking or to stop running a bit earlier. Mostly it was the hills that were getting him.
I found it fairly easy to jog beside him, and actually enjoyed the shorter run/walk intervals. I was rarely out of breath, and was able to chat most of the way around. His contributions to the conversation were mostly monosyllabic 
.
The experience was almost like going back and running with the ‘me’ of a few months ago. I was around the same weight and level of fitness then as he is now, and would have barely been able to go at the same 60 second walk/60 second run rate. It really made me aware of how far I’ve come in such a short time, and I think it was motivating for him to see where he’d be in a couple of months if he keeps it up.
After we’d finished, A was weary but feeling pretty pleased with himself. He did better than I thought he would, and he’s keen to join me again on Tuesday morning.
When I got home, I checked the stats on my heart monitor. Normally, I’d take about 28 minutes to do my run (including walking for a bit both before and after) and I’d burn around 470 calories. I’d spend about 7 minutes in my target heart rate zone for weight loss – the heart monitor usually told me 30% of my calories were “fat burning”.
This morning’s jog took about 33 minutes, but 19 of those minutes were within my weight loss target heart rate zone. Although the exercise was a fair bit easier, we took longer to cover the course, so I still burned around 420 calories. But the most interesting bit was that the heart monitor told me 45% of those calories were “fat burning”. So I actually burned off more fat during this easier jog than I do when I run faster!
My friend enjoyed the jog and is planning to join me every second day until he builds up his fitness some more. He doesn’t want to push himself too hard and says he needs a day’s break after each run to recuperate, but I think he also feels like he’s holding me back. But according to the heart monitor he’s actually helping me to burn more fat!
Running with A on alternate days will work out well. I still want to do the harder runs, as they build my fitness more than easy runs will. It just means that now I’ll be doing a “fitness” run every second day, and a “fat burning” run on the days in between. I think that will work out really well. If nothing else, knowing that A is waiting for me out in the chilly darkness will stop me from turning off the alarm and going back to sleep!
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