Pippa The Runner

Over the last few weeks I've been trying hard at the gym. I knew that I wasn't going to lose all my weight or get fit over night and I knew that it was going to be hard, as going from relatively inactive to super gym user wasn't an overnight thing. I found my stride though, I know that compared to some Gym users it was a slow stride, but it was right for me.

I've lost weight and I've lost inches but I didn't think that my fitness had really improved, I'm still out of breath when walking up stairs (although Flyfour admitted that he felt the same when we walked up the stairs at the Train Station together the other week) and despite seeing myself go for longer and on "harder" settings on the machines I still feel that I'm the unfit overweight person I was two months ago.

Until today.

This morning I went to the gym as normal, it's a no weight day and so I decided to start on the treadmill. I've started doing a thirty minute session on the treadmill as I've found that I can easily do this and on a couple of the programmes it increases the incline and speed for me so I don't have to worry about the settings and can just watch TV. Watching TV makes the time go really fast and so it feels like I'm not actually exercising. I also love looking at how many calories the machine thinks I've burnt, how far I've walked and most of the TV programmes that I watch are about half an hour so it's a win win!

Anyway, over the last week I've been trying to increase my speed so that I can walk further and burn more calories and it's working. I like competition and so racing myself like this is a great boost for my confidence and of course as I work harder and burn more calories I get even more excited about my weight loss which makes me want to work harder still.

Today though I didn't think that I was going to burn more calories (according to the on screen count) than I had last night so I thought, I'll just up the speed for a bit. There was only two minutes left on the clock, so I brought up the speed and started jogging and then running but stopped before I was flat out sprinting as I've not done that for a few years.

And I loved it.

I've not run for years, not properly anyway. A quick run after a toddler or a jog after a wayward ball doesn't count to me, but this was proper running and yes it was only for two minutes but it felt good and it was a huge mental milestone for me.

I've been thinking that it's not until I'm a lot lighter that I can go running, as when I think of me running I think of myself panting, bright red and collapsing in a heap after a few meters, but I realised today that I could do interval running on the treadmill and I would probably love it.

So that's the new plan. I've looked up the different interval sets I've pinned on the Pippa World Fitness Pinterest board and on various other fitness websites I love to read and I'm ready to try one of them for the rest of the week.

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