Back in April a friend asked me if morris dancing made me fitter and I had no idea. But I knew a way to find out.
Some time before I started dancing, I don't remember when, I tried Couch to 5k. I thought running 60 seconds might kill me, but was impressed that 90 seconds of walking was enough to recover to do another 60 seconds of running. So I might have carried on except that I did this in the middle of hayfever season. By the time I got home I was a mess and was never doing that again.
So back in April, I tried it again. This time I was surprised that 60 seconds of running was so short - I could have carried on. And since the terribly weather this year meant that hayfever season started late, I set out to complete Couch to 5k this time, aiming to end with a parkrun at the end of summer.
I skipped to week 2 and found that 90 seconds was too much running... I couldn't do three runs a week because you were supposed to do low impact exercise on your rest days and dancing on concrete in clogs was very much not low impact. But I managed to finish in mid August. Except that the program doesn't get you to running 5km, it gets you running for 30 minutes. Which only got me about 4km.
I then spent some time getting up to 5km and once I could do that, I registered for parkrun. At which point every Saturday was either raining, or lovely weather but I was busy. I finally managed it this weekend. And with a faster time than the 5km I'd done beforehand.
When I originally decided I was going to run I decided that the parkrun I decided that I'd stop running then and maybe go swimming instead. Except that sometime near the end of the Couch to 5k program I thought it would be a shame if I lost that ability to run after spending so much time on it. So now I am going to keep it up, at least until it gets too cold for my asthma.
I still hate running. But it's better with a podcast (especially if it's a funny one). Although the Olympics (on the radio) was a good thing to run too as well. And it is at least free: I already had running shoes, which I wore for morris practice.
