Day 12: Saturday, January 31, 2009

As you can tell, I skipped a couple of days. This was due to reasons of increased stress at work, and less "home time," as well. Sadly, I have also began feeling under the weather with a slight head cold, but I will push through and get back into my workout regime today - I cannot take any more days off due to petty excuses.

Today I began as I have been doing for week 3 - with 1:45 intervals at 4 MPH followed by 1:15 intervals at 5 MPH. The first two times I had done this interval periods, I had found it very difficult, mostly, because I was watching the clock - so I began today determined not to watch the clock so intently.

I, instead, focused on the music, my breathing, and my rhythm with my steps. And what I found, was that I was able to easily complete my intervals. I don't know if this was a product of suffering through the first two workouts with these intervals, or if it simply had more to do with the fact that I was not focused on the times I could slow my pace back to 4 MPH. I believe, it was more due to the latter.

I was able to run, and do so consistently, with minimal effort, and minimum increase in heart rate - but a slow, rhythmic breathing and pulse rate - it felt good, and I felt as if I was not pushing. I was making progress.

Only a few times, did I actual have issue with the running (after checking the clock with 30 seconds or more left to go on my runs), but those times were very, very limited, and even after losing my rhythm, I focused on regaining that, and did not focus on the clock - and as I said, while it was still a lot of hard work to run each and every 1:15, it was very rewarding and a lot easier than it had been.

In total, I completed 18 minutes at 4 MPH (after slowing my pace after my last run, I added another 30 seconds of fast pace walking before completing my cool down) - for a total distance of 1.20 Miles, ran 13 minutes at 5 MPH for a distance of 1.08 Miles, and with cool down, I completed a total of 32:30 seconds with a total distance of 2.33 Miles.

I also did 75 curls of a 40 lbs weight and 30 pushups.