Still jogging!

It's hard to believe, but I have kept up with jogging!!!  Rounding off my 4th month of jogging I feel I might be getting the hang of it, because the first few months sure didn't go as planned.  One thing was for sure, I knew I wanted to do it and I was going to figure it out no matter what I had to go through.  It seems so silly, it should just come naturally but it didn't for me.

In the beginning (ok, couple of months) I experienced extreme leg pains, to the point it was even affecting me when not jogging.  I read every article I could find and they all seemed to provide different information.  But after a while I saw the same pattern, shoes, terrain, and stance.  Well, shoes (Asics Trail Tambora 3) were taken care of for my birthday, and as far as terrain, I do my best to jog in woods, asphalt, or stone paths versus the sidewalk.  But this wasn't enough.

I turned to my stepdad who is an avid jogger and he said I needed to think about compression, wrapping my legs to help with the pain.  Well, I unfortunately don't have time to wrap my legs, see, I squeeze jogging into my schedule twice a week and it can't take up anymore time than it already does.  Then I remembered when researching shin splints and tibia pains, they kept mentioning compression socks or sleeves.  They're expensive but luckily I received an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday and I knew just what to buy.  Being that I order from the UK and have it shipped to The Netherlands you can't always get the exact item you want, so I ended up with men's compression socks - but hey they still do the job.  I love them, from the moment I put them on I knew they were going to help.  Too bad it takes 5 minutes to get them on, they are soooo tight, probably could have gone with the next size up.  Besides the socks I ordered support soles for my shoes but after a couple uses took them out and never thought about them again.  (BTW, I use 2XU Men's Compression Performance Run Socks.)

 

Now that the socks were helping I felt I could start making progress.  Yet still I was experiencing pain while jogging, and I knew this just wasn't how it was supposed to be.  But who is supposed to teach someone that doesn't want to spend the money for a trainer, I'm a beginner and didn't want to invest anymore money than I already had.  I went back to the articles I had read about stance and thought I should just try something different, even if it was for one session.  For some reason it was pounded into my head to jog heel to toe, maybe that's because it's how we walk.  So when these articles said to land on the middle of my foot or even my toe, I thought they were crazy.  But I tried it.  Instant relief, wow!!!  After this point I had already been jogging with injuries, so it took a while for the pain to go away and the muscles to properly start building.  I used to ask everyone, why do I only feel it in my calves and lower legs when I jog, and no one could answer me.  Now that I land midfoot instead of on my heel, I can feel my thighs and abs working, yes!

It's been a couple weeks since I adjusted my stance and I finally feel I am making progress.  The only other thing I had to work on was my playlist.  I had been using a couch to 5K program but since I don't have the time to jog 3 times a week it wasn't working, plus the music sucked and didn't motivate me at all.  I decided I needed my own music but since I still walk & jog in intervals I couldn't just let the music play on, I wanted it to change per activity like the program I had used.  So I searched out an MP3 cutter, and now adjust the songs to the amount of time I want to jog or walk.  It's simple, fast peppy songs mean jog, and slow songs mean walk, I even added a warm up & cool down.  It's been really motivating.  And as I improve I adjust the length of the songs, I trim off walking time and build up jogging time.  I hope to one day be able to jog for at least 20 minutes straight (have to set small goals and be realistic).

Needless to say, I enjoy jogging and pushing myself.  Telling my body to just hold out and keep running because the song will eventually end, ha-ha!  (I'm only up to 3 minutes at a time.)  And besides everything I mentioned above, I still tote my dog along for company and use Endomondo to track my results.

Any of you have any jogging tricks to share?

Bye! Dag! Adios! Namaste!

:) Danica