Running 5 km Is Easy Now! February 15, 2007
Since doing that 10 km run last week, I’m now finding 5 km runs fairly comfortable.
In the past week I managed to complete a 5 km course I’ve struggled with in the past. The course goes up and over several coastal headlands, with a particularly hard hill leading up and around the lighthouse at the half-way point. I’ve never been able to run all the way up that hill; I have to walk for a minute or two and catch my breath.
This week, though, I ran right up and over the hill without a problem. I completed the 5 km in 29:45, which I was pretty happy with. I felt great afterwards, coming home and telling my wife what I’d been able to achieve.
Last night, I ran the same course again and did it in 26:45! I knocked a whole 3 minutes off my time! As I mentioned in Breaking Barriers, it seems that once you get it into your head that you can break a barrier, you really smash it. (Note that the 5 km run I mentioned in that post was mostly flat – I’m now running a very hilly course in close to the same time!)
World’s Strongest Dad October 24, 2006
Check out this inspiring story. Make sure you watch the YouTube video at the bottom!
Dick Hoyt was a self-described “porker” who had never run more than a mile at a time. Then one day, his wheelchair-bound 11-year-old son wanted to enter a 5-mile charity run to benefit an injured classmate. He struggled, but he managed to push Rick all the way. Rick loved it.
Today, Dick is 65 and Rick is 43. They have run the Boston Marathon 24 times. They’ve completed 212 triathlons, including four 15-hour Ironman events in Hawaii.
Theirs has got to be one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever read about a father’s love for his child. I was pretty pleased with myself to have jogged 5 km (3 miles) pushing G in a stroller until I read that! I think I’ve got some work to do…
Early Morning Walks September 25, 2006
For the past week, I’ve been taking my daughter G (4.5 years old) out for a walk first thing in the morning. She wakes up early (around 5:00 to 5:30 am!), and won’t go back to sleep. So I usually end up getting her up and changed, then playing with her until everyone else gets up (around 6:00 on weekdays, 6:30 or 7:00 on weekends).
For the past week, I’ve be putting G in a pram and going out for a walk. I figure I’m up early anyway, I may as well be getting some benefit out of it. She loves the walks, too.
Oh, and in case you think it’s weird that a 4.5-year-old needs supervision in the mornings and rides in a pram – G has Down syndrome. She can walk fine, but not for long distances and certainly not at a speed where I’m getting good exercise. She really enjoys riding in the pram and waving at other early-morning walkers and joggers.
Here are some recent photos:
When you live in a small coastal town with views like that, why wouldn’t you be up for sunrise?!
Overcoming Fitness Obstacles: Time July 18, 2006
This post is part of the Overcoming Fitness Obstacles series, and is a follow-up to the Fitness Obstacles: Time article.
There are two main problems with finding time to exercise:
- finding a time of day when you can actually do exercise (especially if you have kids, a job, or other demands on your schedule)
- the time it takes to exercise, when you’re already overloaded with other things you need to do
So, how have I dealt with the time problem?
The single most successful thing I did was to start getting up half an hour earlier every day and going out for a walk or run. It really isn’t too hard – I only miss half an hour of sleep, and the extra exercise seems to really wake me up and boost my alertness throughout the day.
If you need some help getting up earlier, check out Steve Pavlina’s article How To Become An Early Riser (and also Part II).
The time it takes to exercise has always bothered me, and I think it’s a big reason why I’ve never been able to maintain any regular exercise. Time spent exercising is time not spent doing any of the dozens of other things clogging up my To Do list.
My solution was to listen to podcasts and audio books on my iPod while exercising. I had a whole bunch of books I’d been meaning to read for a long time, and never found the time. I was able to find many of them in the audio book section of my local library and rip them to my iPod (deleting them after I’d listened). Others I bought on eBay, and sold again after I’d listened to them. Exercise time was no longer ‘dead time’, it was now a valuable learning time. I was actually ticking things off my To Do list while I was exercising, and I was learning a lot of stuff that helped me in other areas of my life as well.
Another trick I’ve used from time to time is riding an exercise bike while watching TV. There are a few shows I like to watch regularly, and they usually involve just sitting passively on the lounge for half an hour up to two hours. I sometimes get on the exercise bike and pedal while watching. I go fairly slow and steady during the show so I can pay attention, and then go hard during the commercials. Your family might laugh at you a bit, but it works!
Some other ideas that might work for you:
- ride a bike to work and shower when you get there
- get dropped off at work in the morning with your bike, and ride home (so you don’t have to shower at work)
- catch public transport to work, and jog home
- work out during your lunch hour and shower before returning to work
- give something up (a TV show, a hobby, or some other commitment) to get back some time for exercising
- go for a jog or walk with your significant other, combining relationship time with exercise time
If you have some more ideas for overcoming the obstacle of time, please post them in the comments below!
Technorati Tags: exercise, motivation, time, fitness
Overcoming Fitness Obstacles
Back in May, I wrote a series of articles about various obstacles I’ve encountered in my quest to become fitter: Fitness Obstacles. Now I’m revisiting those obstacles, and giving suggestions on ways you can overcome them.
Having lost over 20 kg now, and improving my level of fitness from huffing and puffing around a 3 km walk to running 5 km in 26 minutes, I can vouch that these techniques work for me. Hopefully they’ll work for you too!
This entry will serve as an anchor point for the posts to come, and the links below will be updated each time a new entry is posted.
- Time
- Boredom
- Guilt
- Laziness
- Feedback
If you can think of any other obstacles you’d like to see me address, please let me know in the comments below!
Technorati Tags: fitness, motivation, exercise, weight loss, workout, time, boredom, guilt, laziness, feedback
Fitness Obstacle: Feedback May 19, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
Any new form of exercise will be interesting for a while, as you master new skills and learn new techniques to perform it. Without some form of feedback, though, your exercise sessions begin to feel repetitive. You’re just going through the motions, repeating the same activities, and don’t feel like you’re making any progress. You begin to question the whole point of doing the exercise to begin with.
I find I need some kind of scoring system to measure my progress. Maybe it’s your personal best for lifting weights, your time to run 5 km (3 miles), your lap time for swimming, or the distance you can cycle in 30 minutes. Your body weight or measurements can be effective as a score, if you’re taking up exercise with weight loss or body shaping in mind. Whatever the scoring system, keeping track of your performance and seeing it improve is a very motivating thing.
The feedback problem is a longer-term version of the boredom problem.
For any single exercise session, boredom will hinder you getting started and can cause you to stop early. Over a longer term, a lack of feedback will cause your motivation to decline and your exercise routine to become stale and seem pointless.
When an activity is both boring and lacks feedback, you’ll dread it and have very little motivation for the next session. Boredom leads to skipping individual sessions, and lack of feedback or progress leads to dropping the whole routine.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, feedback, exercise routine, workout, excuses
Fitness Obstacle: Laziness May 11, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
I guess everyone can relate to laziness 
.
Of course it’s easier to sit and watch TV for an hour than it is to get off the couch, get changed, go to the gym for a workout, come home, shower and get changed again, and sit back on the couch. That should be obvious to anyone.
There’s also the type of laziness where you slack off during your workout. You don’t lift as much weight as you should, you don’t run as fast or as far as you should, you take it easy instead of putting everything in. Basically, you’re putting in the hours but you’re not really extracting much benefit. Without someone to watch over me, I’m very prone to this one!
The problem is when you slack off for one day, you’re more likely to slack off on the following day as well. It becomes a habit, a way of life, and it’s hard to break out of on your own. For years now I’ve been going to start exercising ’someday soon’. There’s comfort in continuing to do what you’ve always done.
Exercising is all about pushing your body out of its comfort zone. By definition, that’s uncomfortable (duh!). Without effective motivation and self-discipline techniques, we just won’t do it.
The problem with laziness is that it pays off now, whereas hard work pays off later. It’s hard to fight that. This issue ties into my next article, on feedback.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, laziness, exercise routine, workout, excuses
Fitness Obstacle: Guilt May 9, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
It might sound strange, but guilt is a problem for me in planning to start an exercise routine.
If I go out exercising in the afternoon or early evening, I leave my wife at home to look after the three children. I don’t like dumping that on her, especially since she’s run off her feet all day looking after them while I’m at work. My wife also has a part-time bookkeeping business to run and stuff of her own to get done.
Having less time with the kids in the early evening is not appealing, either. Like most modern parents, I feel guilty enough about how much “quality time” I get to spend with them during the week, and I’m not going to cut it back even further. I already work shifted hours so I can leave work at 4 pm to get a decent amount of time with them.
I already have a few regular evening activities, such as my camera club, which require a bit of flexibility from the rest of the family to accommodate. Starting an exercise routine on top of that feels like I’m stretching the friendship with my wife too far.
Like most husbands I know, I have a long list of chores and jobs I’m supposed be doing. If I go out exercising, I’m not getting those things done. Either they don’t get done (not an option!), my wife does them (also not much of an option!), or I do them later and don’t get time to do other things (see my article on Time). Whatever the result, I feel guilty.
I even feel guilty about the cost of exercise. I guess there’s no real cost involved in going for a walk, but most other forms of exercise are going to involve gym or pool fees, equipment, shoes or clothing, etc. Since my wife stopped full-time work to stay at home and raise our children, money has been a little tighter. While we’re still very comfortable, I don’t like taking more out of the budget than I really need to.
I guess the reason guilt is such a problem for me is that I’m looking for an exercise routine to incorporate into my lifestyle. This is not just a health kick that could be indulged for a couple of months and then forgotten about. The changes I want to make are going to be more or less permanent changes to my routine, so anything that affects the rest of my family needs to be sustainable over the long term.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, guilt, exercise routine, workout, excuses
Fitness Obstacle: Boredom May 6, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
Any kind of repetitive exercise just gets boring after a few sessions. This is a killer for many people, and they can’t ever seem to keep themselves motivated to keep up with the exercise. That’s certainly the case for me.
In the past I’ve tried swimming laps, walking/jogging, going to the gym, stair climbers, treadmills, exercise bikes, aerobics and more. But none of them occupy my mind or have any apparent purpose, so I always feel like there’s something else I could be doing that’s less boring, more fun, or more productive.
We know in our minds that the exercise is doing us long-term good, but there’s no immediate payoff to each activity. It just feels like something to be endured, which certainly doesn’t help with getting motivated before each session. It’s easy to just skip a session because there are better things to be doing. And while skipping individual sessions probably doesn’t make much of a difference to your overall fitness level, it’s a habit that eventually leads to giving up on exercise completely.
Consequently, many of us never reach the stage where exercise has become a part of our weekly routine. We give up before it becomes an ingrained habit. Because we don’t stick with it for long enough, we never get good enough or fit enough with any of these activities that we feel like we’re achieving anything. We’re was just filled with dread beforehand, and the session is uncomfortable, painful and exhausting.
Thinking back, the fittest I’ve been was when I was involved in several social sporting activities many years ago. For a few years, I was playing various combinations of roller hockey, indoor hockey, outdoor hockey and netball on different nights of the week. So I was doing a lot of running and moving around, enjoying myself, and getting quite fit. I didn’t get bored with these sports, as we were always working to achieve some outcome – scoring, stopping the other team from scoring, winning the game, getting the ball to our shooter, etc.
Team sports are great for putting the fun and motivation back into exercise, but for people with young families they’re not really practical. Problems include:
- You’d need to be involved in at least two or three different activities in order to get a decent amount of weekly exercise, and most of us simply don’t have that much free time in the evenings.
- Social sports come with various extra commitments (training, umpiring for others’ games, etc) that we don’t have time for.
- Game times tend to vary all over the place – one week you’ll be playing at 6:30pm, and the next you might be playing at 8:30pm, which doesn’t fit in with the demands of a young family very well.
- You don’t feel you can make a commitment to the other team members to be able to play every week for the whole season – for various reasons, there would be times that you couldn’t make it to a game and you’d be letting the team down. You need flexibility, or at least some control over the schedule, which you simply can’t have when other people are involved.
- If you have a partner, you’d probably feel guilty going out and playing games while your significant other has to stay home with the kids.
All this sounds like a list of excuses, but boredom is a genuine demotivator for many people (including myself). If that’s true for you, it needs to be addressed if you want to start a regular exercise routine and be able to stick with it over the longer term.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, boredom, exercise routine, workout, excuses
Fitness Obstacle: Time May 4, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
If you have a family, run a business, or have other important commitments, it’s hard to find regular time in your schedule to devote to exercise.
I have three daughters, aged 3, 2 and 8 months (hereafter named G, S and H respectively). Any parent will understand the workload that involves, and the difficulty I have finding time for any kind of regular exercise. In addition to that, my eldest daughter has Down syndrome, so she develops slower than the others and needs additional care and attention.
Besides our families, most of us have a bunch of other commitments and responsibilities. We need to earn a living (either at a job or running our own business), we’re involved in community service or charity work, and we have hobbies and pasttimes. In addition to my day job as an engineer, I’m a keen photographer, I’m the librarian and webmaster for my local camera club, I’m the webmaster for my state Down Syndrome Association, I’m an occasional weekend wedding photographer, and I run several other web sites.
My typical weekday goes something like this:
- 6:00am – wake up, get G up and dressed, get ready for work
- 7:00am – leave for work
- 7:30am – working
- 12:00pm – lunch
- 12:30pm – working
- 4:00pm – leave work
- 4:30pm – family time, dinner, getting girls fed/bathed/to bed
- 7:30pm – cleaning up after dinner, housework
- 8:00pm – watch TV/DVDs, do stuff online, dabble with digital photos/video, etc
- 11:00pm – bed
I just couldn’t seem to fit regular exercise into that routine, despite a few attempts. I thought of all my options, and couldn’t see any that would work:
- Before work: Getting up at 6:00am is already very early, and I’m tired enough as it is.
- During my lunch break: I only have a half-hour lunch break, so I can’t fit in changing clothes, exercising, showering and changing back into work clothes, and getting something to eat in that time-slot.
- After work: I need to get home to help with the girls’ night-time routine. I also don’t want to sacrifice family time, since I get precious little of it as it is.
- At night: After a long day at work, the last thing I feel like doing is going out in the dark for some exercise. Including showering afterwards, any form of exercise would take at least an hour out of my evening, leaving even less time for relaxation, time with my wife, and all my extra-curricular activities (which I’m already behind on!).
Most people have similar difficulty finding a regular timeslot for exercise in their daily or weekly routine. It seems impossible without sacrificing some other aspect of your life.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, free time, finding time, exercise routine, workout
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