Exercising during lockdown

A pretty normal week for me this week after my surprise 10km last week. A couple of Freeletics workouts and a 4km run.

I’m feeling the effects of working from home a little bit. I used to cycle everywhere – to and from work everyday and then about town for meetings and to see friends. I was active and not sedentary.

This week, I realised that I hadn’t left the house for two days. I sleep, eat and work in the same room. I spend most of the day sitting down unless I actually make the effort to exercise. So actually taking time to exercise every day is actually a life saver.

I’m tending to exercise at the end of the day, rather than the morning. My preference tends to change, but in winter it’s harder to get up and often I just want to crack on with work, so exercise is a good way to mark the end of the working day, before cooking dinner.

On another note, now I’ve reached my 10km target I want to take it easy a bit. I’m considering signing up for a half marathon next year, but in the meantime I just want to run without pressure. I’m wondering though if a coach/target will help me not abandon runs or not bother. It’s a bit like Freeletics – I only keep doing it regularly because I have a coach that I’ve paid for.

Anyway, when do you exercise and what keeps you motivated? Let me know below…

10km = done!

Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash. This is definitely not me or my immediate surroundings.

My goal at the beginning of the year was to run 5km. I hit that goal early in the summer. It was a somewhat unambitious target to be honest. I hadn’t realised how quickly you can work up to running 5km.

I stretched the goal to 10km. And my plan was to do that by Christmas. I’ve been using the Nike Run Club app coach to get me there. Yesterday it was going to be a 9km run. So off I went. At roughly the point when usually I get a 1km announcement from the annoyingly chipper coach it didn’t arrive. Looked at my phone and realised I hadn’t actually pressed ‘go’.

I had a choice then. Either fuck off the whole thing and just do any old distance. Or press go and run 9km on top of the 1km I’d already done. I was in a good mood so I went for it.

As often is the case when I’m running, at some point between 2km and 3km I absolutely hate it and want to stop. Couldn’t imagine doing another 7km. But then gradually you get into a rhythm. And then suddenly you’ve done half of it and you’re far away from home. And at that point it’d feel like a real failure to stop. Also, you’d have to walk back and feel like a loser. So you keep going.

Once I’d done 7km I realised that I could probably carry on beyond 10km. But it was raining and it was getting dark so I got to 10km and stopped. It wasn’t until I was in the shower afterwards that I realised how pleased I was. I’d smashed my target weeks ahead of time. And it wasn’t too bad!

Today I didn’t even feel that sore. A little perhaps. But I had enough energy to do a Freeletics workout. And that felt good too. So yeah. A good couple of days.

The final push for 2020

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

I ran my first 8k yesterday. Feel pretty chuffed about that. My (somewhat under-ambitious) goal at the start of the year was to run 5km, which I did in spring. So I doubled it. Aiming to do 10k by Christmas.

I reckon I could probably do it now, to be honest. A friend of mine said that if I can do 8km I can do 10km. I certainly felt like I got into a rhythm about half way and could have just carried on.

Also because most of my runs have been around the 4-5km mark I don’t ever actually get that far away from my house! It was really nice to run a significant distance on a grey Sunday afternoon. And it certainly helps me not feel cooped up.

I’m way behind on the Mastering the Pull-up thing too. I need to pick that back up again

I was also hoping to have completed my current Freeletics journey by the end of the year, but I’m behind on sessions so I don’t think there’s any way of doing it unless I train every day between now and Christmas – so maybe I’ll chill out on that.

Basically I’m trying to use this new lockdown to get over the slight lack of enthusiasm I had recently for training. Shake it off. Get back into the groove. A final push for the last few weeks of this shitter of a year.

Finding it tricky again

Oof. Maybe it’s the weariness of knowing we’re going into another lockdown here in the UK. Maybe it’s the heavy weekend I just had (oops). But I wasn’t feeling it today. I haven’t been feeling it for the last week, to be honest.

I’m finding some of the exercises really tough again. I think this is because Coach has been pushing me on some of the trickier exercises. I’m getting pistols and archer push-ups. Spider push-ups. And today the new knee jumps, which are so hard.

I always want to push myself when I choose a journey. I want it to be hard. But then when I find the workouts difficult I am more likely to skip days. So maybe I need to double down on pushing myself to train as regularly as possible.

But it is hard when some the exercises feel almost impossible. Got to just keep practicing I guess!