Going 10km has become my new 'normal'
My fitness regime changes a lot but lately I have been adjusting it for reasons related to my age and also a concern about sagging skin because I spent a lot of my life bulking and lifting as well as a brief and ill-advised dive into taking PED's. These days I am just trying to eat clean and keep my cardio up or actually focusing primarily on cardio and still doing weights, but not focusing on them nearly as much as a used to.
Not long ago I would chase the clock on a 5k and often would burn myself out pretty early on because I wasn't using very effective metrics to get myself through that sort of things. I found myself burning out sooner and sooner and it didn't make much sense to me because you are supposed to get better at something the longer you do it, right?
src
Now I am not as old as the guy in the above image, I'm only in my 40s, but now I am kind of enjoying the idea of being active even when almost everyone else that I know is not. I recently read a story about some people in their 90's that still do marathons and while I have no notion of being that kind of person, I like the idea of being active.
So recently, I have taken a new perspective on my jogging or as I should call it, my cardio activity in general.
instead of trying to beat some sort of per km time when I am out there like I was doing before, now I just aim for one of two things: I either do 10km or 90 minutes of activity, whichever happens LAST. As you can tell by the above overall time of nearly 2 hours, the 10km happened last as it tends to on a lot of days. This was because my right knee was kind of bothering me yesterday so I mostly walked this along the lake in my overly populated city. I did very little in the way of jogging at first, but later on I started to get bored so I did some light jogging. While I wasn't monitoring it the entire time, I don't think my heart rate broke past 150 very much, if at all.
This is the main feature of days that I think most people would just treat as a "rest day." This WAS a rest day for me, but I was still out there doing something that I enjoy anyway. I put on a podcast and just headed in a certain direction. Most of the time I wasn't in any sort of cardio stress either... then at some point I decided "ok, it's time to run now" and that was exactly what I did.
By the time I got home I had accomplished my 10k and honestly, while I was covered in sweat, I wasn't that tired. I did my stretching and then slept pretty well later on.
My philosophy as someone that calls themselves a "normie" when it comes to fitness is that if I hate the exercise that I am about to do, I am not going to do it at all. I cannot allow this to happen.
So if you are in a position in life like my own I think that it is very important that you find activities that you do not hate and do them. If you loathe the idea of doing a workout then I think you have chosen the wrong workout. Your desire to push yourself will eventually come, just like how after an hour or so of walking yesterday I suddenly felt the urge to start running instead of walking, even though absolutely nobody was going to force me to do that.
The jury is still out on whether or not this is going to accomplish anything major for me, but the worst case scenario is that I am achieving stasis, or staying the way that I am. I'm not really trying to lose weight anymore, I am just trying to stay as fit as I already am. I think a lot of people should adopt fitness programs like this because I truly believe they are beneficial and the best part is that they are easy to stick to.
I don't have all the answers guys, I didn't go to school for this. Almost all of what I have learned simply comes from trying things, and mostly doing things incorrectly before fixing them... I think that a lot of people maybe can learn from my mistakes, and not make these mistakes themselves.