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Originally Posted by court5505
I remember always quitting around week 5. When you go from jogging for 8 minutes to jogging for 20 minutes, it was just always a huge jump for me. Does anyone have any tips to get me through it?
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Let me preface this with I don't know anything but...
It sounds to me like the program is trying to get your body to switch from an anerobic cycle to an aerobic cycle. Upto this point you are simply informing your, let us call them less used, muscles that their presence is going to be required. So you are exercising but not in a continuing (meaning aerobic) way. By increasing the length of time the exercise lasts, you are depleting your body's store of oxygen and requiring it (and your metabolism) to gear up for continuous demand.
How to get through it? You might try viewing it as not having to jog three times as far, simply that you are going to ask your heart and lungs to maintain their rates for three times as long (if that makes sense). And if you can't make the 20 minutes, try for 14
. The program's goal is couch to 5K in 9 weeks but if you stop in the middle, what's the point. What harm can there be if you go from couch to 5K in 10 weeks, or 11 or 12. The desired destination is 5K, I think, not 9 weeks.
Me, I'm a dog walker. Every night we start out like the Iditarod (I'm musher to 2 dogs, my wife mushes one). Three miles later, we have three whipped pups and a couple of tired mushers. We've found it is the only way to get all of them to sleep through the night
. I'm not sure if they're really sleeping through or if my wife and I just don't hear them.
loveajax - When you describe your pain, is it muscle soreness or more like a toothache? The former is just your muscles complaining that you are deviating from your normal self. The latter could be a mechanical back issue (like pressure on a nerve). In either case, pain is your body's message to you that you should pay attention to what you are doing. The idea is to achieve a desired level of fitness, not cripple yourself.