My Journey With Health And Fitness – Attempting Level 4

Yesterday I got up and dressed to do my workout on the treadmill. I checked the weather and it was cold (felt like -14). I decided I was not going to do that workout because my garage would be freezing. As the day really did not warm up much I decided to take a ‘cold’ day (I really couldn’t call it a snow day as we barely got any snow). There was absolutely no way I intended to torture myself in that kind of cold. I did still manage to do a decent walk with Keeva in the afternoon though apparently it was even too cold for her as she opted to end the walk early and head back home.

I realized it was probably a good plan to scale back a bit yesterday and bring up my readiness score as today I planned to move up to level 4 on my treadmill. I have been doing pretty good at level 3 and if I do level 2 as part of my 2nd workout during the day I find it too easy. It made sense to me that it was time to increase the workout. Since it was not a lot warmer than yesterday morning I dressed to be able to handle the cold layering a vest on top of my light running jacket. I felt pretty good and was ready to get at it.

I will note, I was not able to complete everything in level 4. To put it in perspective, I am now referring to the treadmill as ‘the bitch’. It started out pretty good with a fair amount of running within the first few minutes. I was ok with the 7 1/2 minute run which started out at 6 kph then moved up to 7 kph. The program gave me a small break then hit me with 8 kph for 3 minutes which I didn’t quite do for the full time (though I kept running). After a quick slow down in speed the bitch came back at me with 9 kph at which point I manually dropped the speed to 7 kph because I was done. Holy crap! I was so not prepared for that but I got myself to the end completing the remaining running segments (which didn’t go above 7 kph) followed by a 1/2 hour brisk walk during the last 10 minutes of which I added some extra running.

While I was not happy with the bitch, I felt pretty good with that workout as it had really challenged me. I’m actually excited about trying to master that level by the end of next week. However, when I think about it I realize she will then try to kill me with level 5. Anyone else thinking about my post when I first got this treadmill and I thought I could simply increase the levels every day or so? Yeah, I’m now laughing at me too.