Starting Slow

by Dave Klecha

I’ve been home from Iraq for about two years now. (In fact, that two year anniversary will arrive just days before I’m finally mustered out of the Individual Ready Reserve.) And in those two years… I haven’t done much running. After I got back, I didn’t have to run a Marine Corps Physical Fitness test and, to tell you the truth, I kind of enjoyed sitting on the couch, eating pizza, and drinking a lot of empty calories.

Not a good way to stay fit, and, surprisingly, I didn’t.

But now I want to get back into running. I want to compete in 5K races, and maybe eventually 10Ks with my born-athletic brother and his marathon running girlfriend. Oh, and maybe I want to shave off a few pounds, too. So, how do I do it? Just get on the track and get on that 21 minute 3 mile pace I ran in Boot Camp?

If you’ve read the title of this entry, you know the answer already.

As it is, the running enthusiasts’ website Cool Running has a “Couch-to-5K Running Plan” handily displayed on their website. And the secret to their method is starting slow. In the first three weeks, if you follow the program, you will actually spend more of your thrice-weekly workouts walking than jogging or running. And that makes sense. After my first jog down the state park trail near my house, my legs stiffened up almost as soon as I collapsed into my desk chair here in my home office. I was sweaty, rubbery, and exhausted. Happily, none of those lasted long, and I actually wound up more energized than I’ve been in weeks.

Incidentally, that last bit is the biggest hurdle my wife faces in getting into a healthy exercise regimen. Working out to gain energy is, after all, quite counterintuitive.

At any rate, I could probably start off skipping up to the second or third week in Cool Runnings’ starters regimen, but it makes more sense for me, and for anyone picking up fitness from scratch, to start slow. For one, it gives your body time to adapt to the big change you’re throwing its way. Hard training, pursued too early in a fitness lifestyle, is a great way to injure yourself and sidetrack a life of exercise and health before it even gets started. For another, the program gives you a measureable series of goals to strive for. Even within an actual work-out, those first five or six weeks, you’ve got these intervals of jogging and walking, breaking the work-out itself into a series of small, achievable goals.

Next time, I’ll talk about applying this philosophy to other work-outs.