Well, we had a bit of a delay in our running schedule. Being on vacation took a toll, in a good way - it was hard to muster up the energy to run when we were exhausted from swimming all day. We returned home rested and ready for week three, when I did something incredibly stupid (at least, in hindsight).
I bought some new inserts for my shoes. Nice, cushy inserts with a wonderfully padded heel.
They felt wonderful when I was running. The following day? Not so much. Both my knees were effectively immobile, and I felt like I had hot needles sitting just under inner portion of my knees. A discussion with my boss at work (who's a marathon runner) about shoes gave me an inkling of an idea that the inserts might be a problem. So when I got home, I took them out, and the pain in my knees diminished almost immediately.
Sigh. OK, trash one set of inserts.
Even with that, the pain in my knees persisted - I treated them with Aleve and ice for several days before I felt like I would be able to run again. At that point, I decided that while my current shoes were comfortable, they were pretty much too trashed to continue running in. So my next step would be to find a pair of running shoes to that would let me run without further destroying my knees.
After soliciting recommendations from various runners, I found a store that would do a gait analysis, and tell me what kind of shoes I should be wearing. Which is exactly what I wanted, since I was completely ignorant and unable to answer the questions that experienced runners asked me about my arch, roll, and what-have-you. They managed to set me up with a nice pair of Nikes, which felt great.
At which point, halfway through week three, we all got sick. Bleah. This seems to be an inevitable consequence of the start of the school year. There's a reason why the Lovely Mrs. Robb and I refer to kids as "cute little petri dishes".
Anyways - that knocked us back, yet again. So doing Week 3 of the program actually ended taking up... um. Two and a half weeks? Closer to three weeks? Something like that. Eldest Daughter and I ended up repeating a day of the Week 3 program, just because it felt like we should.
We kept up with it as best we could, though, through bum knees, bad shoes and a bad cold. The end result being that this was Week 4, and we're now running (well, jogging) for 5 minutes at a time. I measured it - that's a whole half of a mile that I'm managing to blast through; not once, but twice during a session.
Woot!
We still have one more day of Week 4 to complete, then we get into Week 5... where we will be hitting what is (for me) a major milestone at the end of the week: ramping up each day until we are running for 20 minutes straight. I will be very honest, and say that if I can manage that by the end of next week, I will be freaking amazed. I suspect that it will take a couple of tried before I am able to reach that goal.
I am incredibly happy with the progress we've made, though. To top it all off, I've also managed to loose about 10 pounds in the process - though I think that is more an result of making the effort to eat more salads and fewer french fries. At 220 right now, I am hardly svelte, but frankly, this is the best shape that I have probably been in for two decades.
Which makes me quite happy!
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