Running Outdoors

As many of you know, I did the Couch to 5K program in the comfort of my own home, on my treadmill.  I talked about finally completing it here.  My friend Linda over at Linda's Lens has been encouraging me to take it outside and I finally took her advice.

Let me just say this - running on a treadmill and running outside are 2 completely different things.  First, when running on the treadmill I am parked in front of the television and I have my ear plugs attached to my I Pad music.  I usually run at a zero - 1 incline, which basically means flat ground!  Also, there is no terrain to stumble over and finally, no wind resistance.

Since we were recently at the lake house, I finally decided to try this outside running thing.  I got up bright and early, got into my jogging clothes, threw a baseball cap on my head and walked down the block and back to warm up.  Did I mention that I had to pick the coldest morning so far this fall to do  this?  It was a nice cold 30 degrees with a stiff wind blowing in from the lake.  Brrr...... 

After my warm up walk, I started off at an easy trot and was dismayed to discover that the run up our block is at a pretty good incline and more difficult to run than I anticipated.  I ran up the block and down the other end of the hill to the cross street, jogged about 2 more blocks and I felt like my lungs were going to blow out of my chest.  Plus, the cold air felt horrible on the back of my throat.  Crap on a cracker, 4 lousy blocks into my run and I was already slowed to a walk for about 300 feet.  This was not going so good.  I silently cursed Linda for her bright ideas, took a deep breath and pushed myself to start running again. 

The area where our lake house sits is quite hilly, so I found myself not only running up and down the hills, but dodging gravel, pine cones, puddles of water and the occasional turtle.  I ran through a neighboring campground, around a marina and then headed back towards the house.  I'll admit that the last incline was rough and I again slowed to a walk for about 200 feet, before finishing off my run huffing and puffing. 

After another walk up and down the block to cool down, I decided that I did better than I expected.  I ended up running 1.75 miles in about 28 minutes.  I apologized to Linda in my head for cursing at her earlier, and decided I was glad that she pushed me to try running outside.  Thanks Linda!

In fact, the next day I laced up my sneakers and headed out for another run.  The 2nd day was a little better because I knew what to expect, and it was about 20 degrees warmer, which I liked much better.  I ran the exact same route, only had to slow to a walk once for about 100 feet and ended up doing the 1.75 miles in 21 minutes.  I was really happy with that.

At the end of my run, I was greeted with this.....

Now when God gives you a reward like that, it just has to  make you smile and vow to go out and do it all over again the next day, right?

Today I'm also posting over at Tony's Nutrition Tips.