A year of running

[liv]

I was going to post this when I had three milestones clustered together: a year of running, a hundred runs, and 200 miles total. But I was going through a really bad patch and I just felt too discouraged. Now things are going a bit better, but I'm still finding it hard going and feel I've lost ground.

So I started the Couch to 5K beginners' running programme at the end of September last year. It went really well; each successive week the workouts got enough harder that I was challenging myself but not impossible so that I felt like giving up. And I got through the programme (it took me I think 12 weeks rather than 9, but that's no big deal), and by the end of it I could comfortably run for half an hour without stopping. Slowly, but considering that even one minute of running felt daunting at the beginning, that felt a big accomplishment.

I definitely like running better than generic cardio. Partly because it's such a basic thing, I can get a fairly objective feel for how I'm improving without worrying about things like the exact machine settings. Partly because at least having the potential to run outdoors sometimes makes it less boring, I can actually go somewhere rather than being on a machine. This also means that I can just put on some trainers and leggings and run, I don't have to faff around going to the gym, getting changed, remembering my washing things etc. Of course, the down side of this is that sometimes the weather drives me indoors; I don't know if I should maybe go back to just switching around cardio things like ellipticals, bikes and rowing machines when I do have to be in the gym, because at least that would be a bit more varied. On a good day, I come close to enjoying a run, though good days are still the exception rather than the rule. In any case I'll take less hateful, because it's a lot more possible to motivate myself to do exercise when it's only mildly unpleasant rather than both unpleasant and boring.

I think one of the reasons that C25K worked well for me was that I got into the habit of running three times a week. I had to be quite strict with myself to make that happen, but aiming for three and falling short was was definitely getting me more exercise than aiming for twice a week and falling short. I also gave myself permission that on days I ran, I didn't have to do any other exercise. Half an hour of running was visibly better for my fitness than the routine set by the gym trainers of 10-15 minutes cardio, a random bunch of strength exercises, and a second 20 minutes cardio. Partly I think because the half hour of running I was actually doing whereas I would often talk myself out of doing a miscellaneous workout, because the latter was varied enough I couldn't do it on complete autopilot but not varied enough to actually hold my interest. And was taking ages, by the time I'd waited for a turn on the various weights machines, meaning that I could only fit it in when I had a whole evening free.

After I finished the official programme, I invented a training regime based on it and some advice from green_knight: I rotated three workouts. Running for 30 minutes and trying to get as far as I could; covering 5 km in intervals of 5-10 minutes running at a faster pace with 5 minutes walking to recover; and running slowly for as long as I could keep going. At the "end" of my C25K training, I couldn't actually run anything like 5 km, my half hour runs were about 3.5 km. So I built up the distance over my longer runs by 10% each week until I could actually cover 5 km, still taking about 45 minutes over it, but covering the full distance. Doing the intervals didn't improve my pace for the 30 minute runs as much as I'd hoped (I think in hindsight I should have done shorter intervals faster, maybe), but in the first half of this year I improved from 3.5 km in 30 minutes to 3.7 km, close to my initial goal pace of 8 mins/km which I'd read was reasonable for beginning runners. I was also actually running three times most weeks; my logs record a 5-week and a 6-week sequence where I didn't miss a single run.

Then I went away on holiday and while a few weeks' break shouldn't have made that much difference, being out of routine messed up my fitness and my motivation. When I came back I was frustrated because I couldn't seem to manage 3.5 km in 30 minutes any more. And I was a bit stupid and told myself that I'd just do 30 minute runs until I got my fitness back, dropping my carefully designed training regimen and ignoring what I know about the general literature on behaviour change and my own personality. So of course I didn't really improve because I was doing the foolish thing of repeating the same behaviour and expecting different results. Then my phone broke in a way that meant I couldn't really use it for measuring my runs any more, so I wasn't even getting the motivation of a "high score" to try to beat, but I could tell I was getting slower and slower because I'd cover less of the track each time. And at the end of the summer I had several weeks where I was ridiculously busy and couldn't manage to keep up the running, and two weeks when I was away having an amazing wonderful holiday, and when I came back I had picked up a horrible cold. I tried to just push through it (I nearly always have some kind of a sniffle, and if I made that an excuse not to exercise I'd never exercise) but was making myself actually ill with asthma, so I gave up for a few weeks.

So that's how I ended up with 100 runs in the year when I'd been hoping to average somewhat over 2 runs per week. I'm still not properly better from this perpetual cold, but enough better to start running again. And it's been mostly too cold to run outdoors, especially with the viral infection precipitating my asthma and my lost ground in terms of fitness, so I'm grimly struggling with making myself run on the treadmill. I've had a month of running fairly regularly again, though I'm not quite making three times a week yet. And I'm just about clawing my way back to the level I was at the end of 2012 when I could consistently run 3.5 km in 30 minutes.

My plan for breaking out of this slump is to start playing with the Zombies, run! app which is supposed to gamify running training. I need to figure out the practicalities of carrying my oversized phone (it doesn't fit either in my pocket or my fancy runners' bumbag) on me while I run, and running with headphones in so I can hear the music and instructions from the app. Which isn't ideal but I really need to vary what I'm doing and get some tangible rewards, otherwise I'm never going to improve and I'm in too much danger of giving up my good habits.

Because I was concentrating on the running I'd mostly dropped my weights routine. But I've taken up weights again. I'm trying the Stronglifts programme, which involves doing 5 sets of 5 reps with low-ish weights, and 5 exercises which use more or less the whole body rather than individual muscle groups. The thing about this is that it's all stuff I can do at home with my barbell, so I can do it on the alternate days when I'm not going to the gym for my treadmill time. Though I think if I do get up to serious weights it might get to the point of being a bit dangerous to do on my own without either a spotter or a rack, so I'm a bit cautious. But that's not an issue when I'm throwing little weights like 10 kg around. And it's motivating because I am improving perceptibly, I'm increasing the weights about every other week. I think I might try to book a training session at the gym and see if I can get a professional to check my form is ok, because I'm not sure that watching videos on the internet is a safe way for me to learn how to do weights. Though I don't know how hard it's going to be to persuade the trainers that I want to get strong rather than thin.

OK, so talking about getting thin. When I started exercising regularly 3 years ago, I weighed 81 kg, my BMI was 32 (obese, according to the official definitions), and most of my clothes were size 16 or 18. After two years of regular exercise, my body was exactly the same shape and size as it had been when I was totally inactive (other than my upper arms being somewhat more muscular). I was vastly fitter, but I was still just as obese. I felt somewhat vindicated by this because my assessment of the evidence is that most people have a set point weight which they maintain over quite a wide range of dietary intakes and activity levels.

However, a year of running has made a visible, measurable difference to my body in a way that the previous two years of exercise didn't. Maybe it's the three times a week rather than two, maybe it's that running is actually more effective at improving my overall fitness than the misc cardio I was doing previously. Weight wise, it's pretty laughable; my lowest weight has been 79 kg and my highest, which is also the most recent measurement, is 83 kg. I would have been prepared to admit that months of regular fairly intense exercise had caused my weight to drop a bit, but 2 kg in half a year is not exactly impressive! I've regained more than I lost, though. My inclination is that this represents random fluctuation (I've not weighed myself anything like systematically) rather than reflecting the fact that I've been somewhat less active in the second half of this year than I was in the first half.

But the truth is my body is a somewhat different shape. Most of my clothes fit fairly loosely anyway, but the few garments I own that were previously snug are now loose. I comfortably fit into a size 16 for most clothes, and maybe even a 14 if it's cut generously, whereas before I was always on the borderline between 16 and 18. I'm still by any reasonable definition fat, just about all of me is still squishy. Yet, people who haven't seen me for a while comment that I've lost weight. And people who haven't seen me for a while and with whom I'm physically intimate have noticed that my body is changing shape. Which is really weird for me, I have to say that I never started doing exercise for aesthetic reasons, I am very interested in cardiovascular fitness and not at all interested in what shape my body ends up. The best I can describe is that I'm still fat, but there's substantial muscle underneath. It seems like rather than getting thinner exactly I'm getting curvier; I've always had a somewhat narrow waist compared to the size of my hips and bottom, and that's more true now. I still have a tummy, but it is somewhat leaner, and I still store plenty of fat on my bottom and thighs, but now there's muscle as well and if anything my bottom is bigger than it was. The main consequence, other than weird compliments that make me uncomfortable, is that I've gone from finding it difficult to buy clothes that fit both at my waist and my hips, to finding it just about impossible. It's not like I have much choice in the matter, but I find I quite like being both plump and muscular at the same time.

Posting about exercise milestones is probably even more bad form than posting my sermons, isn't it? I like to post an update a couple of times a year so that I can get a long-term picture of how I'm doing; the day-to-day stuff I put in dedicated places like Fitocracy and c25k. (Thanks again to rmc28 for creating that community, it's been a huge help with motivation.) Hopefully people who find this stuff annoying can skip over posts like this, and I will try to get back to posting something more interesting next.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

You could Add more zombies to your exercise?

(I can see the obvious problems with this - the app doesn't know your personal fittness, whether you have asthma, or even the terrain you're running on - it could easily push you too hard. But the idea is entertaining!)

[rmc28]

That's the app liv mentions starting to play with. I've just started using it and am loving it (not as scared as one of the commenters on that post though!)

[liv]

MOAR ZOMBIES! Yes, that's the app I'm planning to try next in order to get my motivation back. From the reviews of it I've seen, it sounds like it's pretty good at rewarding you for doing well without punishing you for not going fast enough, which agrees with the best psych research I'm aware of as being most effective for motivation. But the reason I'm holding off until I can manage 3.5 km in 30 minutes is that I'm nervous that I'm just too slow for the app's assumptions. I mean, some people say a 12-minute mile is the slowest speed that counts as running rather than jogging, and I am absolutely nowhere near a 12 minute mile.

I really like that Tumblr post, though. Particularly because it informs me that the lead writer of the Zombies, Run! app is one Naomi Alderman, who is also the author of a bunch of subtly poly/queer romans à clef where most of the characters are heavily based on people I know or have second degree connections to. Which makes me the more excited to try the app, I must say.

[rmc28]

Oh! Zombies is all about the time (in terms of gameplay) not the distance. So don't let that stop you :-)

I mean, it records distance (and gives me quite a detailed display of how fast I've been going at what point in my route), and some of the Achievement badges are based on distance. But the missions are basically either ~30 min or ~60 min depending on your app setting, and the help page for Base Builder says that Supplies are picked up roughly in proportion to the time spent running - about 30 supplies an hour. Materials are collected per mission run.

I was highly entertained by the bit on the Tumblr post by the person who was scared by the zombie noises. I suspect that this is more likely if I were running in the dark than in the current bright (if cold) sunshine.

[liv]

Ah, so you don't get eaten by zombies if you go too slowly? I can't figure out if I want that or not. When I first heard of the app I imagined it like that and I thought that sounded really cool, but then I thought, I'm going to be so disappointed / scared if I get eaten, it might interfere with my motivation to run. If it's mainly about keeping going for 30 minutes with some sprints, and badges if I do happen to make a good pace, I think it will work really well for me.

[rmc28]

You can opt for "Zombie chases" when you start the mission. This means that sometimes the robot voice says there are zombies nearby and you have to run 20% faster for a minute to escape them. But if you don't escape, the mission continues.

When I did it, I escaped once and got "caught" twice but that just affected whether I unlocked the zombie escapology badges or not. I might try it again when I'm more used to the robotic voice (today I actually made out the distances/times it was telling me).

[redbird]

There was a chunk of time, after I started exercising regularly, when people would look at me and assert "you've lost weight" and I knew I hadn't. I tended to say something like "actually, I've gained muscle" (I was literally thinner, but not lighter, because of muscle being denser).

The other clothing-related nuisance of my body shape having changed, in part due to weight-lifting, is that I'm having a very hard time finding a jacket that fits, because anything that has enough room across the shoulders gaps at the waist and lets cold air in. The clothing industry does not seem to allow for women exercise who in ways that give us broad shoulders. That I'm still not exactly thin may make this more obvious, but I suspect that a thin woman with the sort of shoulders:chest:waist proportions I have would also have trouble. Oddly, when I started going to the gym I remember being "reassured," and overhearing gym staff assure other women, that weight training wouldn't make me bulk up in unfeminine ways, because those large, muscular upper arms required more testosterone. This change is subtler, but a practical nuisance separate from gender identification or roles.

[jack]

I keep expecting friends to say "you're dense" instead of "you've lost weight"... :)

[liv]

I have to admit that's a good pun, and one I could imagine your friends making... *hug* Yay muscular Jack, anyway.

[liv]

Until quite recently I wasn't quite sure it was true I'd gained muscle, I maybe just had better core strength and posture, which people interpret as "thinner". By now I'm pretty certain that my girth is smaller and my weight the same or slightly higher, though.

That's really annoying about shoulders, grr useless clothes manufacturers! I pretty much can't wear things with fitted sleeves any more, which is a bit of a pain, though I think my frame has fairly narrow shoulders anyway. We'll see what happens if I progress to more serious weights. If I cared about aesthetics I think I might potentially be tempted by T, cos I would like in some ways to have a more androgynous body shape. Though I doubt that even testosterone plus exercise would actually allow me to find trousers to fit, and I'm not actually about to start misusing androgens.

[monanotlisa]

Haha, I've stopped believing gym trainers who don't have actual physiotherapy or equivalent credentials: It is absolutely not true that you need testosterone to bulk up, as both you and I found out.

I will admit the majority of my upper body musculature comes from swimming, which is widely regarded as making for more bulky women. But there is no magic in water; the movements could be simulated by gym equipment.

[monanotlisa]

Good read.

Muscle is heavier than fat on human beings, so the idea of exercising to lose weight is doomed to fail in many cases: Yes, most likely you did lose fat weight; you built up muscle weight though.

And I agree about the whole set weight points for each individual. I'm at mine, and have been for almost a decade now.

[liv]

My understanding is that, in a somewhat over-simplified way, most people have a weight set-point, and their metabolic rate changes if they change activity and intake levels. A minority of people have a metabolism set point, so their weight is much more prone to fluctuate based on exact calorie balance. If I really wanted to weigh less I would probably be combining more intense and more frequent exercise than I'm currently doing with mild dietary restriction, but even with that I agree the odds aren't great. But there are enough people informing me like it's supposed to be obvious that if I just got up off my bum and moved around more I would magically get thin, so I am recording the evidence that this doesn't in fact happen.

[monanotlisa]

I am no dietician, but this sounds sensible.

Yes, additional factors can make some difference in dropping weight; post-hospital and rehab (terrible food, opiates that dulled everything including appetite, hours of exercise every day) I was genuinely skinny.

But what's the price if your body is set to a different level? If with some exercise and balanced nutrition leading to solid health scores, you just weigh more than some ridiculous Hollywood ideal, then it makes zero sense to torture yourself, or others.

We know that human beings have always spanned a range, because art has preserved our images over millennia now. The blindness of some contemporaries...

[liv]

Yes, in this respect I do very much buy in to the HAES philosophy. If you're doing plenty of exercise and eating well, the size you are is very likely indeed to be a healthy weight for you. It's not just Hollywood that preaches otherwise, though, it's the medical world, who have this idea that everybody should have a BMI between 20 and 25, though the evidence doesn't really support this at all.

[lethargic_man]

That's interesting. I recently had a female friend with a BMI not dissimilar to yours (or how yours was last time I saw you!) asking me what my general diet was, because she wanted to lost weight. I told her my shape was down to my genes, that most people seem to have a natural weight they gravitate towards, and that dieting to lose weight only works for very few people long-term, but I gave her a précis of my diet anyway; it'll to be interesting to see if it has any effect if she does actually take any of it up.

What I don't understand is how this concept of a natural weight intersects with the existence of people who go from one long-term body shape to another—generally in the weight-gaining direction, but occasionally also the opposite.

[liv]

A set point weight doesn't mean that it's absolutely fixed forever and ever no matter what circumstances. There are various things that can change it; it's heavily dependent on hormones, which means that it is very likely to change with age and certain medications, for example. Long-term lifestyle changes can eventually shift the set-point too, at least for some people. For example prolonged starvation / calorie deficit seems to shift a lot of people's metabolism to an energy-conserving mode, which explains why serial dieters often gain more weight each time the yoyo swings upwards. The minority who do lose weight long term through calorie restriction and increased exercise seem to have some combination of a (probably heritable) tendency that they are more likely to change their body type than their metabolism, and are also usually people who do a really substantial amount of exercise, eg upwards of an hour a day of high-intensity exercise. (But there are plenty of people who do that and are still fat, so just "more exercise" is definitely not the whole story.)

[yalovetz]

Congratulations on all the progress you've made in the last twelve months. And congratulations in particular for continuing to think about creative ways to keep your running going, despite having life throw a few hurdles in your way that curtailed things for a while. Sounds like you did the sensible thing in taking a break when you noticed it was hurting your health, rest and recovery is important. Zombies app is a great idea to renew your motivation and interest in running. :)

I've recently been on the hunt for a trainer to help me out with, among other things, my lifting form. Feedback from the ones I've consulted with so far (none of whom I've been particularly keen on) is that my form is excellent and they're impressed with what I've picked up from watching YouTube videos and reading about things. My interpretation of this is that most people don't think too much about form or pay much attention to it, so if you're smart and thoughtful, watch the videos closely, listen to how things are supposed to feel, and tune in to what's going on in your body when you're lifting, then you can probably learn pretty well from online resources. I reckon that probably covers you.

It's worth a try with a trainer, but yeah, the problem I've had is that too many of them are focussed on weight loss and/or muscle gain. Body composition changes, basically. I've had to work quite hard and do fairly extensive research to find one who doesn't have that focus. I've found it so frustrating when I go into a consultation and lay out exactly what I want (nothing to do with body composition) and still get comments on weight and/or musculature from the trainer.

[liv]

Thank you, this is really super-encouraging. What a killer nuisance that it's been so hard to find a trainer who's prepared to support your goals rather than the usual assumed ones about body composition! I hope you're right about learning to lift from videos; I feel like I'm quite bad at learning from videos in general, and I'm probably more scared than I really need to be of injuring my back through incorrect technique.

[mathcathy]

I've barely been able to do any exercise over the last two weeks : a 17k walk, a 16k cycle, a 8k run and a 3k run is way way below my normal 5 days a week 1 to 3 hours exercise. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to get back into a serious routine after the break.

I ran my first ever 10k just before I went away because I figured I'd lose fitness, but wasn't reckoning on it being quite so tricky to fit any exercise in.

[liv]

Wow, it's pretty amazing that you've got to the point where a week with a hike, a cycle and two runs counts as barely any exercise! I should think that much exercise should be enough to at least maintain fitness even if you don't make a lot of improvement? Good luck, anyway.