I took up jogging 2.5 months ago. I’m going off the c25k schedule, which slowly ramps you up from couch potato fitness to being able to run a 5k. This was much more effective than just trying to get into jogging by mimicking other, fitter, joggers, which was what I did every previous time I briefly tried to get into jogging. I feel embarrassed for never having thought of this before – it’s clear that ‘my brain was off’ in those times when I went mimicry-running.
One issue that made me get into jogging so ineffectively: I didn’t realize how terrible my starting physical fitness was. I used to think I was… like… normal? No athlete, for sure, but I’m a “normal amount of miserable” on hikes (and can complete most of them), I’m an intermediate boulderer, I rarely notice activities I’m gated from because of fitness. But when I started c25k with three partners, none of whom regularly jogged, they were all significantly less winded than I was.
And for the first dang time in my life I explicitly had a thought that went, “I can run 1 minute before my body forces me to stop. My partners can run 3-4 minutes. Some people can run 30 minutes.”
Once I actually had any sense of “jogging levels” it was so clear how close to the bottom I was when I started out. That gives me some hope that being much fitter will solve my fatigue problems?
I used to be able to run 1 minute, and now I can run 2. By one (terrible but also kind of reasonable?) metric, I’m twice as fit as I used to be. But a nontrivial fraction of the population can jog 30 consecutive minutes! It seems worth getting to that point to see what that does to my energy levels / cognition.
Also: I haven’t been sticking to the c25k schedule. I go 1.5 times a week where it expects 3, and I stuck a level between week 2 and week 3 because the 1.5m→3m jump looked insane to me. I’ve been on that custom level 2.5 for a month. I had a mindblowing conversation with the giant and 81k yesterday where I went, yeah, I’ve been stuck at week 2.5 because I’ve felt unready for week 3. And they said, that’s probably because you’re not going enough.
What do you mean? I asked. I’ve run about a full session and a half session every week for four weeks. Isn’t that the same as 3 full sessions every week for two weeks?
No, they said, surprised I didn’t know this. There’s an optimal timing. If you’d probably stuck literally to the c25k schedule you probably could have gone from level 2 to 3 in a week.
GYARJRGH? I said. FUSBARIJIJJLK?
(I still disbelieve the literal claim that I can go to level 3 after doing level 2 properly, but I believe them that I would be leveling up a lot faster if I stuck to the schedule)
Anyway, some things I’d like to say to my past self, who felt obligated to work out for fatigue issues and then proceeded to exercise very badly because there was such a big ugh field around the topic of exercise:
- You do not realize how big the gap between you and even moderately athletic people is. This is good, actually. It means that the correct place to start is easier than you think.
- You should try to do it like 3 times a week. Date a jock. There are some on tumblr
- Consider starting this when you have positive pressure rather than negative pressure. When you’re buckling under multiple joy-sparking projects and want to rise to the challenge, it will be much easier to start & stick to it than when you’re an anhedonic lump who has nothing to look forward to, but knows that exercise will in theory make life better in some vague way.