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So, the pyramids on Tuesday, physical therapy on Wednesday and Thursday, the doctor appointments for Matthew on Wednesday and Friday, altogether had me feeling pretty beat up.

And the the remnants from Hurricane Ike breezed through, flooding streets all over the place, but more importantly raining all weekend. I don't think I've mentioned this, but I really hate riding my bike in the rain. So no biking this weekend.

But a few weeks ago I stumbled on something that peaked my interest - the Couch-to-5K Running Plan. Work up to being able to run a 5K in 9 weeks. What is it with me and all these exercise-for-some-goal-to-reach-in-X-weeks plans?

This one seemed easy enough - especially when compared to the 100 push ups in 6 weeks. I had a sneaky suspicion that the plan outlined on hundredpushups.com was a little ambitious, to say the least. (I'll still go back to it at some point, though - I still think it would be a neat goal to reach). I'm still trying to decide if I want to actually run in a real 5K in mid-November.

So back to the running plan. All I really needed were some running shoes. A shoe recommendation from a marathon-running-coworker and a subsequent rainy day trip to the mall took care of that.

Then I just had to work out where I'd go, how long, and then program some timers into the interval timer on my sports watch.

The first step was to figure out a route to take that would be about 5 minutes at a brisk pace and lead me to the park. Easy enough - from the treadmill they chain me to at physical therapy I know that I can probably maintain a decently brisk pace of 3.5 miles per hour for the 5 minute warmup, and that works out to about 1540 feet, or about a third of a mile. Google maps to the rescue again, and if I go counter-clockwise around the school on the next block I'll arrive right at the park. And then I estimated that I'd jog about 420 feet in each 60 second interval and walk briskly about 462 feet in each 90 second interval. Eight sets of 60 seconds jogging and 90 seconds brisk walking ought to have me at about 1.3 miles total.

I think I jogged a bit faster than I was intending to, because after all was said and done, and if I remember correctly that I got around the park nearly 5 times (I kept losing count), then I walked/jogged about 1.6 miles, according to Google Maps.

The route I took was pretty boring:

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After I finished, I stretched out again and felt pretty good, except that my quadriceps were a little sore.