My new jogging habit has had some ups and downs.  I caught a bad cold and couldn’t stop coughing - for two weeks.  I think I only went out to exercise once in that time period.  Since then I’ve gotten back on the wagon and exercised - but it’s been more sporadic - maybe three times a week at most.  The temperature has been a little bit cooler outside and with this bug I caught, I was a bit leery of running outside and getting sicker.

After that bad two weeks, I knew I needed to get going again or the past efforts would all be wasted - so I decided to try out the exercise room in our apartment building.  I’ve had a longtime distrust of treadmills and the like.  I thought it would be boring and that I’d feel like a gerbil or a hamster on one of those wheels.

However, the exercise machines are really a positive experience.  I must be the last person on earth to figure that out.  I like the way the treadmill allows you to watch television news while running, for one thing.  More importantly, the treadmill makes it easy to keep track of the time one is running, to incrementally increase the speed of the run.  One of my favorite things is that the treadmill has a usb port that allows me to walk away with an document that records the specific information about the workout.

This morning I was initially going to jog for forty minutes.  Since starting on the treadmill, I’ve been working up the speed to 5.5 miles per hour - but I have not increased the duration of the jog.  But this morning I felt really good so I kept jogging until I hit 50 minutes and then I still felt good, so I jogged for another ten minutes on top of that.

Here is the info that the usb drive picked up for me from this morning’s jog:

Elapsed time: 61:04

Distance: 5.57 Miles

Average Speed: 5.47 MPH

Average Pace: 10:57 / Mile

Hitting 60 minutes is one of my mid-range goals from when I started exercising again.  So I’m pretty happy about reaching that mark for the first time.  I think with the help of the treadmill, I’ll be able to boost both the speed and the time.

I should add that the incline of my jog was at 0.0%.  Definitely a flat run.  So I’ll have to think about adding some incline to the jog at some point as well.  For the time being though, I’m happy to just improve on the duration and speed variables.

When I started jogging some months ago, and started my slow incremental growth in the amount of time I was jogging, one of my initial mid-range goals was to jog for forty minutes and to do that at least four times a week. This morning I reached that goal for the first time. So I was happy about that.

My next mid-range goals to achieve are to jog for one hour and then at some point to jog for two hours. It might be awhile but I’m confident I’ll reach those goals as well. I suspect that when I am able to reach those goals, then I’ll actually start to lose the extra weight I am carrying around.

The main long-range goal all along is to maintain an exercise habit over a period of years in the future. Winter is some months away, but I’m already thinking about how I’ll go about maintaining a jogging habit during winter-time.

This morning I jogged for 40 minutes. I felt pretty good about that because my initial goal when I first started this exercise thing was to get to a point where I’m jogging 40 minutes a day, four times a week. So achieving a jog that lasted 40 minutes was some kind of personal landmark for me. Let me tell you, it’s been years since the flubber has been in continual motion for that amount of time.

And yes, when I hit that 40 minute mark this morning, I felt like the king of the world. Even though I wasn’t.

Since my initial goal I’ve realized I probably want to change that goal to 60 minutes, four times a week. But still, after hitting that time this morning, it was pretty awesome.

I’m still fat. But I know if I can just keep shuffling along, it will eventually go away.

Also, this morning, a jogger pushing a stroller breezed right by me. I got the point buddy - at some point I’m going to have to pick up the pace a little bit.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been jogging 3 times a week for 25 minutes. My intention/plan was to jog four times a week - but I came up short a few times. So I have to change that this week.

This morning I did manage to bump up my jogging time to 30 minutes. So that will be my new baseline jogging time.