My 1-mile marathon, revisited

A few months back I began ‘running’ 1 mile (using the elliptical machine) each day at the gym. Over a period of time I widdled my 1-mile times down to 6.5 minutes and then settled on 7-minute miles from there.

During my drive out to California in Jan, I did not get to work out as often as I wanted although I did lose nearly 10 pounds of weight during those 3 weeks on the road. I did some jogging, but again no more than a 1/4 mile here and there as a warmup to my workout.

Upon arrival in CA, I picked up a small weight set from Big-5 so I had some weights and a bench to work with. A tread-mill has been here at the house for some time, practically brand new and unused, so I began to use that as well. On day-1 I sweat my way to a 0.75 mile run (jog) and quickly realized that ‘running’ on the elliptical is very different then running on ground or tread-mill. Over the next week I built up to the 1-mile mark again (12.5 minutes), and continued that 4 times a week along with my weight lifting. I have since regained most of those 10-lbs while seeing less fat each week.

And today, for the first time, I ran a complete 2 miles without pause. I maintained a 4.8 MPH pace (a good jog) for 20+ minutes. I have been working towards this milestone for 3 weeks and something I have really wanted to do as a personal challenge. I do not like running enough to run longer, but I do want to keep running the 2-miles n my non-workout days while keeping the 1-mile runs as my workout warmup.