Exercise and setting goals: My journey to personal fitness ………Part 2

Wow! It’s been a while hasn’t it; anyway as I said in part one of this series is that I needed to seriously get in shape having gained a whooping 25 kilos in a matter of months. (If you are new here you can check out my first post on this series to get a clearer picture…  ) So there I was on day one all woken up at five in the morning ready to get on the track and do some laps. It was Monday and the month was July I remember very well. I was feeling pumped up I tell you, my legs were itching to run.

I got to the college stadium and started stretching my entire body to extents that I had never attempted before and boy did it feel wrong at so many levels. You see, when you decide to engage your body in a strenuous activity when it is in a state of rest; the body’s natural predisposition is to maintain the status quo. What this means is that it is going to quite challenging to get a meaningful workout going and I was experiencing this fast hand.

I tried as hard as I could to at least get my muscles ready for the hard work ahead and when I felt I was ready, I hit the road running-literally. I did not dare strain myself and therefore for the first about 400M I had a fairly easy time. A short while later at about the 600 metre mark all hell broke loose; my back started aching, my calf muscles started building up so much lactic acid that putting one foot in front of the other became a mammoth task.

I had heard of this kind of occurrence before, where athletes hit what is referred to as the wall. Simply put, the wall is a state during strenuous activity in which the body simply cannot continue working at its current rate. For real athletes who run marathons however, this ‘wall’ usually manifests itself after the 30 KM mark; the next time you are watching a marathon just pay close attention and you will see that it is after this mark that a good number drop out. It takes a great deal of will power to complete the race after hitting the wall: so I guess that we Kenyans do indeed have the will since we pretty much win all the marathons the world over.

So there I was, having hit the wall at the 600M mark! If that is not the epitome of unfitness then I don’t know what is. At that particular point in time I knew that if I succumbed to the exhaustion I would have a hard time going past that mark the next time I ran and so I pushed on. I went beyond the 1KM mark and kept on pushing until I cleared three good laps which is basically 1.2KM.

I have to tell you it was not a pleasant feeling; I was coughing hard and sweating profusely despite the cold morning temperatures. My legs and lower back were in pain; to say the least, I was spent. 3 laps (1.2KM) that is all I could do on my first day. I did some stretching and went back to my room, took a shower and went for breakfast; it was really hard getting anything into my stomach because of what my unfit body had just undergone.

I still remember exactly what the next day felt like; my legs and back were all sore and I wondered if it was going to be possible to run the next day. When I went to bed that day I knew that come Wednesday morning, I was going to have one heck of hard time psyching myself to even get out of bed.

When the alarm rang I got up said a short prayer changed into my running gear and off I was.  My body was still aching all over from the ‘beating’ it had taken two days earlier but I knew I had to rise above pain. After stretching, I got right to it. I pushed myself and this time round I am happy to say that I did a clean four laps (1 Mile); nothing to write home about but an improvement nonetheless.

I continued on with this regimen religiously; by the end of the first month, I was doing 8 laps (3.2KM); a far cry from where I started. At this point I decided to stop concentrating on increasing the distance and rather focus my energy on going faster. The very first time I managed to complete 8 laps I took around 20 minutes ; one and a half months later I had lowered that time to 16:42, not exactly a world beating time but something that I could be damn proud of considering where I was barely three months ago.

By the end of October which was 3 months after I had started running I had lost about five kilos; however, that was not exactly my goal; all I wanted was to achieve fitness. I always had this desire of being a battle tank with a Ferrari engine and so I never really cared much about what I ate provided I could move swiftly.

After about six months of three-days a week running I loved where I was; my breathing was awesome and my heart rate was just where it needed to be. There was a slight problem however; my shins were taking a beating every time I ran and as time went by it was increasingly becoming difficult to run…..problems again!

After every run I would experience a lot of pain and I slowly started associating my healthy habit with pain; this is the worst thing that can ever happen. In order for you to succeed in whatever you engage in- leave alone exercising, you need to enjoy it. Here I was slowly growing to despise something that I had grown to love?!

I had to come up with a solution fast to avoid giving up my new passion. I decided to reduce the frequency with which I ran from thrice to twice weekly. Running in the morning was also starting to bore me (I have never been a morning person) and so I decided to do it in the evening after a long day of studying among other things

The next step was to increase my endurance and the only way I could do this was by increasing the distance I ran. I now had new goals………….; I am going to tell you how I went about achieving them on my next post in this series so STAY TUNED…………………….