Dani VS the Treadmill

This week I have been sans work out buddy for lunch, so instead of going to the park, I have been driving to my gym. Lucky for me, my gym is close by to where I work. Coincidence? I think not. (much thanks goes to miss Kelli for pointing me in the direction of said gym back in January)

Anyhow I got to the gym today and my favorite machine was already taken. It is a smaller gym, so they have about one of each specialty cardio machine and then six or seven treadmills. So as you may have guessed, I opted for the treadmill today. Now, I do not claim to be a runner by any stretch of the imagination. I believe I have stated that before, but just in case you forgot. Dani = not a runner.

Now that we have that cleared up, I get on the old treadmillrooski and decide that for this lunch break I will put in a solid 30 minutes. I get warmed up for about 3 minutes on 3.9 mph speed walking. Then I notice the man next to me glancing at what I'm doing. My first instinct was to tell nosy where he could look next, but instead I convinced myself that he was probably just jealous of how insanely good I was at speed walking and continued on.

Once my first 3 minutes of speed walking were up, I decided to see how long I could last jogging. I upped the speed to 5.3mph and felt pretty good. I was surprised at how easy it felt at first. It's weird to describe because sometimes it feels really good to jog and other times it feels plain awful. The plain awful could be described as knees aching, lungs burning(thanks years of smoking) and shins feeling a little sensitive. But the plain awful feelings come and go with this feeling of euphoria, like I can just do anything.

Through the ups and downs of the 5.3 mph jogging I tried to tell myself to not look at the time. That maybe if I didn't see it, that I would last longer. So I glanced down at the start of it all at 27 minutes left to go, then again at 23 minutes to go, and then lastly at 17 minutes left to go where I felt my arm raising to lower the speed. I swear my mind thought I could go longer, but my knees were telling a sadly different story and somehow overpowered my will to keep at that speed.

In total I lasted ten minutes at 5.3 mph and then for the duration of my time I continued to speed walk at 3.9 again. I had this feeling of satisfaction for lasting for ten minutes jogging with out stopping, followed by a feeling of disappointment that I couldn't keep going. I have decided since returning to my desk that there is really no reason to be disappointed. Although it is completely natural for me to be hard on myself, I have come a long way from only being able to jog for like 2 minutes and will continue to try to stay positive, despite my ability to find the negative in just about everything.