“We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.” — Jules Verne

Working parents who go back to school have a lot of demands on their time, and often personal fitness is one of the things that falls by the wayside.  When you have a bunch of kids around, a boss to please, and you're running out of time to submit that assignment for class, it can be really tough to find time to go jogging or cook a healthy meal. Even when you're vegan!

I know this one all too well, as I went back to school to finish my Bachelor's in 2004 and I'm still a student five years later.  I was never great at monitoring my snack intake, so this prolonged period of relative inactivity hasn't been great news for my waistline.  (Or rather, it's been great for my waistline, which means it's been bad for me!)

Anyway, I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and do something about it.  I saw a number of web sites about going from no running at all to running thirty minutes at a stretch, and that sounds pretty good.  But there are two issues with the way those sites describe their approaches on this.  First, they all advise to run three times a week, and it seems like they're only doing that because you need a day off after running, but if they say "every other day" it won't fit into a seven day week very well.  Second, they boost the amount of running every week, in some cases pretty aggressively.  I want to make some progress on this, but competing in a 5K by the end of the summer isn't my goal here.

So I considered both of those issues and have designed my own schedule.  I'll run every other day, and add slowly to the amount of running every eight days until I've gone from only a little running to being able to run for thirty minutes straight.  More specifically, during the first eight days I'll run for six minutes and walk for twenty-four.  They'll be split evenly so that I'm running for a minute, then walking for four, and repeating that sequence six times.  In the next eight days, I'll run nine minutes out of thirty.  The eight day period after that, I'll run ten minutes out of thirty.  From there, I'll add two and a half minutes to every eight day period until after eighty days I'll be running for thirty minutes straight. Perhaps a table would help:

And after those eighty days, that means running for a thirty minute stretch.  Or at least it looks good on paper.  I did my first run today, six sequences of one minute of running and four of walking, and it went all right.  Throughout all this, I'll only run every other day.  On the opposite days I'll walk for thirty minutes, so tomorrow I'll walk for thirty minutes. And I'll take it from there and see how it goes.

Next up, I quit my job, but it all works out very well thanks to UltraLearn.

Add to: