Kick Your Craving

Getting fit

Last night I went for a run. Nothing heavy, just a light 20 minute jog by the river. I’ve run a few 5 & 10k races and my time used to be pretty good, despite being a heavy smoker. I ran my last race about 3 years ago, and have done minimal running since.

Last night, I was surprised at quite how out of shape I’ve become. After 20 minutes jogging my chest was tight, I was out of breath and my legs ached. Clearly, I need to do something about this.

While I’m motivated from stopping smoking and drinking, I want to get a fitness program started as soon as possible. Previous experience tells me that in order to keep up any sort of fitness regime, it needs to:

1. have clearly defined, short-term goals
2. preferably be a group thing

For example, running allows me to enter races every 3 months or so, with a goal of beating my time. There are also other runners to compete with and running clubs so it kind of fits the second criteria too. I also did kickboxing last year and quite enjoyed it. It loosely fits the first criteria as you are constantly improving and learning new things and easily fits the second as it is learnt as part of a group.

The one small barrier I have is a knee injury I’ve had since last summer. This is only really a problem as I’ve failed to get it checked out properly, so I’ve committed to doing this next week when I’m off work. Until then I’ll have a couple more light jogs and look into a 5k race over the next couple of months to enter.

Also, my old kickboxing instructor now teaches on Saturday mornings, so all being good with my knee, I’ll pick that back up again.

As I hate doing weights, I’m considering the 100 push up challenge in a bid to improve my upper body strength too.

These are just initial ideas at this stage, I’ll commit to a full program once I have more information on my knee injury next week.

Oh, I haven’t smoked a cigarette for 9 days, or drank any alcohol and feeling great about it.

Photo by Josiah Mackenzie