My Journey With Health And Fitness – I’m More Fit Than I Thought

Well it happened again, a driver not paying attention nearly took me out in a crosswalk. I was entering a crosswalk and the vehicle to the left of me was stopped and nodded at me. There was a car pulling up to the stop line on the right as I was already in the crosswalk. I watch the driver look left and right but didn’t look straight ahead as they hit the gas (obviously rushing). I was 1/2 way into the crosswalk and was about to jump back when the driver slammed on their brakes apparently having seen me. Then the driver proceeded to hurl profanities at me I assume because I was somehow responsible for this situation. I remind everyone once again, pay attention at all intersections and crosswalks to ensure they are free of pedestrians.

I got up this morning at my normal obscenely early time and hit the road by 5:15am to get in 2 hours of walking before my bootcamp class later this morning. I’ve been working on my 2 min run, 1 min walk interval training this week but I have to say it has not been very challenging. As I have once again gone back to my mantra of no excuses and have worked extremely hard on my fitness for nearly 7 weeks I realized I needed a new challenge to keep pushing myself. I wasn’t very far into my walk when I decided what to do.

After walking far enough to know I was warmed up I decided to start to run. Initially my thought was I would just run continuously for 30 minutes which would be equivalent to the time I had been doing in my interval training. I hit the 30 minute mark and realized I still felt pretty good so kept going. Since part of my normal running route is still closed I had to loop back on the promenade a few times and estimate how far I had run with the goal of doing 6 km. By time I stopped I had run 7 km and to say I felt proud of myself is a huge understatement.

I want to be clear, I still do not get that allusive runner’s high, for me it has always just been that sense of accomplishment. However, I realized that my fitness level is increasing every day helped not just by serious workouts doing either bootcamp classes or intense power classes but also by the fact that I have for weeks been walking about 4 hours everyday (oh, haven’t been able to break that habit so still doing over 20km walking each day). I am getting back to the fitness level I strive for and I am confident it won’t be long before I am again frequently running 10 km.

So here’s to challenging my fitness and having such an awesome result.