run

Week Two, Day 1

Thursday, July 20th, 2023 

If you are anything like me, the fact that a new week is starting on a Thursday is likely driving you insane. Usually, I like, no, not like, I need things to have a certain symmetry about them. We start a new week on Monday. Monday-Sunday is the week. So why, then, are we starting week two of this process on a Thursday? And again, I bring it back to the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing. 

I can, however unorganized these first few posts may be, admit that the doom and gloom of the previous post has dissipated a bit, and I am feeling good. Are we still under the reign of bug-terror left behind by our hoarding ex-neighbor? Yes. Does the beach still loom as this close-yet-unattainable entity? One thousand percent. Am I going to do this run today with minimal procrastination? Remains to be seen. 

It has been nice using this app again, though. It’s called Couch to 5K, which feels the right amount of accusatory and hopeful, right? Like, they are blatantly acknowledging where we are starting and offering a pathway to victory, the victory, of course, being the 5K. Which…like….yay, victory?? In all fairness to me, and this is something I don’t afford myself often, #onlythehigheststandardsneedapply, I wouldn’t say that I am starting as close to the couch as perhaps this app would suggest. This is the thing about being an active fat person. My level of mobility and exercise at any given point is usually pretty high. Again, Newton is likely spinning in his grave, but it goes back to what I was talking about last time with health and weight and how they are not necessarily always mutually exclusive. Which is tough for people to understand, especially when we live in a world where Fat=death, Fat=lazy, Fat=sadness. I suppose, in certain circumstances, these could all be true, but more likely than not, we are not so locked into this Good=Thin Fat=Bad binary, no matter how much our brains want to trick us into thinking we are. 

And yes, I say this knowing full well that I’ve drunk the toxic, fat-phobic Kool-Aid for literal decades. Again, it’s all a process, we’re all in process, stick with me while I process this process. 

Some facts about this app that I am using: 

Again, the app is called Couch to 5K. I think it was meant to be approachable, and whoever did their marketing should be applauded because it is approachable AF. When I first started looking into running apps during the pandemic, I was looking at a few, and this one seemed the least intimidating. When I open it, because of my mascot, more on that in a minute, I am greeted by a warm wash of pink and purple. See? Nothing scary there! Approachable colors! We love to see that. We really do. Especially when some of these other apps are so intense looking, they were all black and grey with red lettering and made me feel like I should be drinking something with whey in it and the word “muscle” and “milk” and “milking muscle” somewhere on the bottle. 

Speaking of mascots, there are five different ones for you to choose from. They serve as the voice inside your head while you run and tell you when to walk, jog, or run. I always use Runicorn because he’s a cute little unicorn and is the mascot of The Color Run, and honestly, he’s just a fun little dude. Encouraging but not overly enthusiastic in a way that makes you want to throw your earbuds out. 

The other mascots are:

 Constance

• Wild choice of name
• Her tagline: She got off the couch and finished a 5K, so this Couch to 5K alumna can help you do it too. 
• I tried running with her for a while, but she just wasn’t it for me. She was a little too passive, and if I’m being totally superficial, her outfit is a wash of gray or beige, just muted and sad, and she literally side-steps apologetically onto the screen. Sorry, Connie, here’s only room for one insecure runner in my head, thank you very much. 

Billie

• Intimidating as fuck – seriously, she does like a backflip onto the screen and is wearing a matching sports bra legging set with the highest, perkiest ponytail you’ve ever seen.
  • I should also mention these are all cartoon avatars, so someone chose to give her legs for days and a waistline in the negative inches arena.
• Her tagline: She’s no-nonsense; she won’t be your cheerleader, but she’ll get you off the couch and across the finish line.
  • Zoinks, Scoob. I don’t know about you, but I’m, like, tired of people being mean to me to get me motivated. I don’t necessarily need a cheerleader; on the contrary, in fact, if you give me too much positive reinforcement, my trauma brain kicks in, and I immediately don’t trust you. But if you swing the other way and are just mean or call me names or try to hurt me emotionally, like really fuck with my psyche for my own “good” to get me to prove anything to you, I will shut down and stop moving. It might be my depression and crippling exhaustion, but I will just stop at that point. Which is not to say that Billie here does any of these things necessarily. She just reminds me of trainers in the past who have. 
• I have never tried running with her because, again, I don’t need that evil in my life.

Sergeant Block

• Yeah, he looks exactly like the army corporal you think he would and has for sure indulged in WAY too many push-ups and or steroids. …my money is on steroids. 
• His tagline: He’s as “hard Corps” as they come. Follow the training plan, or he’ll make you drop and give him 50.
  • Now, never having run with him for all of the obvious reasons, this is actually interesting, and I’m wondering if you stop the workout before finishing if the app will tell you to do 50 push-ups. That is something worth looking into. Hold please.
    • Ok, it didn’t tell me to drop and give him 50. Granted, I was in the free run, but that would have been really funny. 

Ok, this last one is amazing: 

Johnny Dead 

• Yes. Johnny Dead is a zombie. It’s a fun concept, and I know there is another app that I believe is synced with The Walking Dead, or affiliated with it, rather, but he’s our own little slice of undead heaven. 
• His tagline: He’s a fiendish, brain-chasing zombie. He’ll captivate you and keep you motivated, but he might lose a limb along the way. 
• Stuff like this is fun, but it’s not for me, and if I remember correctly, there was some zombie moaning, which, and I mean no offense to our undead readers, just didn’t really do it for me.
  • Although, if we refer back to the YA novels, it is possible that this is the best kind of training we could be doing. Something to think about.  

So yeah, it’s Runicorn for me, through and through. I’ll give you his tagline just so he’s not left out: He’s a real party animal! He’ll entertain and encourage you at every mile on your magical journey. What’s not to love there?

The program is broken down into nine weeks, with you running for three days out of the week. Which, again, feels very achievable and attainable and, dare I suggest it, sustainable. 

I’m still figuring out the schedule of it all and feel like consistency is going to be the key here. If I can structure my time, I will, and working into my schedule when to run, or at least having certain days where I know those are going to be my running days, feels like the right thing to do. My initial thought was to do the runs Friday-Sunday because the weekend is my off time from my at-home workout program that I’m doing, but that gives me little to no recovery time. So maybe we spread the runs out. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday that feels good. If I feel like adding in more, I’ll see how I feel, but for now, that might be the sweet spot for this routine.

Ok, so I’m committing to that.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. 

I will start this new schedule next week which means that I will run today, which is a Thursday, tomorrow, and then Saturday. Finish this week out and then start with our system next week. 

Good. 

Welcome to the ever-spinning wheels of my schedule-orientated brain. 

Consistency, here we come.

Ok, so it is just about 2:00 in the afternoon. The city is gripped in a heatwave. As I mentioned earlier, I tried to go to the beach today, but no one was available, so instead, I run. I don’t think about the soothing and eternal sound of the waves greeting the shore. I don’t think of the sweet smell of the brine or the distant caw of circling sea birds. No. I chug a liter of water, which I will regret in about fifteen minutes, and I take to the hot ass pavement. I will lean into the sounds of sirens and the construction that has been going strong in our neighborhood for the better part of two years and the unplaceable odor that can only be described as hot urine and regret that is quite literally burned into the asphalt, all the while dodging pigeons that are much more comfortable around humans than they likely should be.

Since I am in week two, there is an added minute to the run, taking me up to a staggering 31 minutes. Today’s workout is a 5-minute warm-up, 21-minute walk/jog, 5-minute cool down. Attainable. Achievable.

Have you noticed me procrastinating again? Because I have.

Alright.

I’m getting up.

I’m closing the laptop.

Week two, day one, here we go.

POST-RUN MORTUM

Running Time: 31 minutes

Distance achieved: 2.06 miles

Tunage: Hamilton “One Last Time” through half of “Your Obedient Servant” (full disclosure, I did skip “Hurricane.” It’s not my jam)

CT5K threw your girl a twist today. So last week, the warm-up was a 5-minute walk. I assumed the same would be true for today. WRONG. Runicorn, my beautiful friend, betrayed me when he told me to start with a warm-up of a light five-minute jog. I have zero memory of this from the last time I did this program. And I assume that it’s going to stay like this? Ugh, I hope it doesn’t stay like this. My neighborhood is very hilly and steeply so. I like the warm-up because I can walk up the hills with no problem. It elevates my heart rate, giving me time to mentally prep for the next thirty minutes where I’ll be doing the most unthinkable thing imaginable¹, and it lets me sort of get in the zone. To dive in with a light jog felt like a lot today. What’s more, I don’t know that I physically can jog up them. I mean, I know I probably could, but if I do, am I going to be totally winded before I even begin? All of this to say, I paused the workout and waited until I got to the top of the hill, then I started the warmup jog on a flatter plane. 

I also wonder, because of the hills, if tomorrow I go to the track 20 blocks north of where we live. I could scoot up there on my bike and then do that? Though if what I remember from my time on a track in high school PE is any indication, a track is not going to be my favorite. But that was some years ago², so who knows? Could be an interesting change of scenery.

All in all, aside from the botched beginning, I feel ok about today’s run. It is interesting to me that I tagged on .06 miles in that additional minute, and it makes me want to be careful. I can already feel my legs getting sore, as well as my core and arms? Who knew arms were so involved?! It’s also not lost on me that I’m tracking this. And that I am writing about all of this and that I am then going to post about it, and then someone is going to read it. I am toeing that line of process-driven vs. product-driven, and if I dip too fiercely into the product of it all, the possibility for me to tip over the edge and go into perfectionism mode is real. In this mode, you’ll see me push harder, complain less, and all around, try to impress you at every turn, dear reader.  

It’s the people-pleasing of it all, right? The “please-god-let-me-impress-all-who-I-meet-so-the-world-at-large-will-like³-me-and-therefore-make-me-worthy-in-the-eyes-of-strangers” area of my brain is so easy to switch on and into full attention. Which is stupid, but also, where I live most of the time. So I want to be careful. I don’t want to push too hard and then burn myself out because someone somewhere might read this and be like, wow, she did another .06 of a mile in that extra minute, she must have worth. Ugh, but it’s so where my brain goes. I want you to think I have worth. I want to impress you. It’s like the guy I ran by yesterday, the one with the abs. I shouldn’t care, but I do. 

This has to be about the process. 

Process, process, process. 

Forget the product. Be a person in process. 

And honestly, when it comes to performing, like if I switch on my performer hat, I fucking love being in process. Put me in a studio class or a rehearsal where we are just discovering and playing and finding things, and I am the happiest version of myself. But make it about me? Make it about the actual human living inside this chubby shell, make it about my body, and I am solely driven by outcome. By my goal and the fastest way I can get there. 

This is what I need to be careful of. And I’m clocking it now at the start of this so I can hopefully hold myself accountable. 

I will say it’s hard to get me to sweat, and today I fucking sweat. I like to think of my trauma and fatty fatty cells just clinging on to the little beads of saline goodness because, god forbid my body actually does anything to cleanse itself from the inside out. But fuck a duck if running doesn’t get the sweat dripping. Planking and my very modified push-ups are the only other things that get me to sweat, but like a standard workout, like the one I do at home 4x a week, barely gets me glistening. I wonder what it means if you don’t usually sweat while you work out. Hold please. Ok, so Google just read me for filth as she usually does and says that dehydration is likely the culprit, which makes a certain sense. You can’t sweat the water if you have little in your body to spare. I did chug about a liter before heading out, which I did end up regretting about halfway through because I have a finicky bladder, but yes, I need to be drinking more throughout the day. Again, when I’m rehearsing for something, I drink upwards of 70oz a day. How is it possible that the performer version of me is the healthier version of me? Jesus Christ what does that say about me? 

I also noticed today, and I suppose I only really noticed because the thing I noticed myself doing resulted in me running into a low-hanging branch; I look down when I run. Like, eyes to the pavement, either about three feet ahead of me or at my feet. Is that ok? I’m going to do some research on running postures…is what I guess that would be? The looking down can’t be good if for no other reason than I run into things⁴, and I have a predisposition for doing that enough as it is without trying to go vroom-vroom fast. I’ll look into that for next time.

Oh, and stretching. That would probably be good to start doing.

1. See running. ↩︎
2. See many. ↩︎
3. See love. ↩︎
4. See low-hanging branch. ↩︎