Gym Progress (Norm style)

My new plan for improving my running at the gym is to try and add 0.5 km to my run each week. I can just about run 5 km at the moment, although I tend to need to stop for short walk breaks (a minute to 90 seconds usually) two or three times during that distance. 

I hope by increasing the distance gradually in this way, by April 29th when I'm due to take part in the 5 km run, I'll be able to run a reasonably comfortable 7 km on the treadmill. (With running on grass/road  being harder going than on the treadmill, I think I need to be able to run further in the gym than is required on the day). 

Lush Roman, my sometimes stand in PT, says I should also do some running practice outside of the gym as it is a completely different mechanic, so maybe I'll need to be doing an outdoors run once a week as well. Although I'm a girl and no idea about distance, so I won't know how far I'm running then.

I went to the gym last night (yes on a Friday and didn't even go to the pub after), but discovered once changed into my PE kit that I had left my asthma inhaler at home. I knew right away that this would prevent me getting much running done. I thought I would see how I got on without it, but after a 5 minute warm up of walking at 6 k.m/ph on 3.5% gradient, then re setting the target distance to 5.5 km and pressing go... 

Well, I tried to run at 9km/p/h, but it didn't feel good from the get go and I was ready to throw in the towel before I'd even run 1 km. My chest was feeling tight already and you'd be surprised just how much more difficult to keep going it is when breathing is even slightly restricted. I resigned myself to only walking and thought I'd continue with that until I'd done 20 or 25 minutes, just so that it had made going in the gym sort of worthwhile. 

I took it bit by bit and after about 20 minutes, my breathing had settled down a little and I was able to run 200 metres at a time, then walk again for 2 or 300 metres to recover and I managed to carry on like this until I'd completed the whole of the 5.5km, but it took me a massive 45 min 48 seconds. A far cry from running 5 km in 32 mins - still my best time. Yesterday's ave speed only 7.2 km/p/h. 

A shame I stupidly forgot the inhaler, but glad I made the distance in the end. If I can get to the stage of coping with a distance of 7km by the end of April, 10km may not be such an impossible task after all...

After the run I did absolutely no weights with a much lighter weight and far fewer reps. :) I really enjoyed that part of the session. Apparently not doing weights was the late great Bruce Lee's favourite bit too. He had a lot of books on it.