Lessons learned while shuffling

I learned a few lessons today, while I did my afternoon shuffle. Let me share with you what they were:

1. You shouldn’t turn your alarm off in the morning (I kinda knew this one already, but it’s been slammed home to me again today), because if you do turn your alarm off in the morning, that means you have to make your exercise up in the evening. Which means:
   • That you’re out in the heat and you sweat more.
   • You’re already knackered from a day at work, so it’s going to be even harder work for you when you do your shuffle and it’s really going to hurt more than in the mornings.
   • The cooking won’t have miraculously done itself while you’ve been out doing your shuffle, so you’re still going to have to go home to do it
2. If you play little games, it makes it more fun and makes the time go quicker.
3. When you really push yourself, you can do better than you thought you could!

Let me explain that last one. Last Monday when I did my shuffle I only managed to do 4.10km and that took me 43 minutes, which gave me an average pace of 5.56km/hr. Tonight when I did my shuffle I managed to do the whole planned track of 5.37km, and at the 43 minute mark I had done 4.60km – which is 500 metres more than my time on on Monday. I know that 500 metres doesn’t sound a lot, but to me that’s a whole helluva lot. Now while I’m in my statistician mode (I can see a whole new career coming on for me here…) here’s a couple more stats for y’all. My average pace last Monday was 5.56km/hr but today I had an average pace of 6.32km/hr. Yeah baby I’m gonna kick arse soon! I’m not quite at running yet, but by George I’m definitely getting quicker.

So to make the time go quicker and to really get my pace going quicker I played a little game with myself. I got my heart rate up to 155 and kept it there for a bit, then I jogged hard until I got my HR up to 170, held it there as long as I could and then dropped back to a walk, until my HR dropped back down to 155 and then repeated the process again and again. God that was killer. Almost like interval training. So that’s how my shuffle went today.

Tomorrow the plan is to NOT turn the alarm off in the morning and get it over and done with and out of the way first thing!