My fitness story, part one
My fitness journey really got started last year. I had been going to the gym for about two years, yet managed to maintain my 174lbs. I would walk on the treadmill for 45 minutes, thinking I was getting in some good exercise and wondering why the scale didn't movie. When I decided I wasn't getting enough exercise, I bumped it up to an hour.
The problem wasn't the amount of exercise I was getting, it was the quality of exercise. I walk all day, every day. For me, walking isn't enough exercise to change my fitness level. I was in some pretty good denial back then. I told myself and other people that I didn't run because my legs were too short and I just wasn't built for running. That was complete crap. Almost everyone can run. Unless your doctor has told you that you physically can't run, you can. The problem with running, or doing any vigorous exercise is that it's hard. Really hard. And things that are hard aren't always super fun. Plus, you're probably not going to be very good at it when you start out. Since running was hard for me, I didn't like it and I assumed I couldn't do it. The truth was, I didn't really try to do it because it was a lot more work than I thought it would be and it was something I could fail at. I really don't like to fail.
When I decided to really try getting into shape, I found a website called Couch to 5K. It had a training plan that started out alternating running and walking. At first, I could only run a minute at a time, and that whole minute sucked. A lot. And after a week or so, I could run two minutes. After three weeks, five. In three months time, I could run three miles in about 37 minutes. (Hey, I'm not super fast, but I'm out there doing it.) I, she of the body that wasn't built for running, ran my first 5K in 11 months after I made the choice to get fit. It was awesome. My whole family came, people I didn't even know were cheering for me when I crossed the finish line. It was one of my greatest victories.
I'll go into more detail about my eating habits and other lifestyle changes in my next post. Here's a graph of my weight loss last year.
