Work in Progress

How do you know if you are making progress in your fitness if you don’t have a gym or a personal trainer to mark progress toward your goal?  You mark it yourself.  And today, I wanted to test how far Chris and I may have come in our journey of working out in the great outdoors.  On October 14, we finished one of the most grueling workouts I’d ever come up with: the Nature Park.  The workout entailed us running around the entirety of the park, following all trails going to the left.  Well, we don’t run so much as jog or run at a walking pace.  But I did us one more in the workout.  How much fun would it be to just run?  None at all.  So, I decided to have us do different exercises every time we came up to a bench.  They were quick little circuits, but effective.  On that date, October 14, Chris and I finished the entire circuit in 90 minutes.  That was about 3 miles of jogging plus several circuits of abs, legs, and arms.

TODAY, I decided it was time to revisit the Nature Park.  I brought my timer so we could get an accurate measure of how far we had come.  I had hoped we would beat our old time, but when the dark started settling in around us, I thought for certain we would have to slow down and it would cost us dearly.  Chris grumbled that it was harder this time around, but I beg to differ.  It was significantly easier, for me, at least.  We did take a two-minute breather at the half-way point, but other than that, I felt refreshed and not quite like I was dying for most of the run.  But how we felt wasn’t going to tell us exactly how we did. So how did we do?  We cut off a whole 10 minutes from our time.  My timer said exactly 1:20.02 when we crossed the finish pole.  Oh, what a glorious finish pole!  The only problems we had were it got DARK the last 15 minutes, and at the beginning of the run, I twisted my ankle, and it scared both of us that we’d have to stop.  I walked it off a little and found it wasn’t irritating me, so we continued forward.  But now that I’m home and have taken my shoes off, it’s not really happy with me.  Good thing we’re not doing any running this weekend, so it can heal.

The problem with doing our workouts outdoors right now is the time change.  When we started planning and preparing for our own workouts, we factored in cold, rain, equipment availability, Chris’ work schedule, and other variables.  We didn’t quite realize how dark it gets so quickly.  I mean, that sun starts going down, and BAM!, you can’t see ANYTHING.  We ran into this dilemma yesterday and Wednesday.  

So, if we continue to mark our progress next month, we’re going to either have to take a day when it’s nice and Chris leave work early, or do it on the weekend, when there will be tons of people around.  Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how far we’ve come.