I reached a significant milestone in my running career last night—it was below freezing and there was snow on the ground and I still went out and did a workout. I know other people do stuff like that all the time, but those people are dedicated, those people are athletes. I don’t see myself as either, but I guess I’m getting there. Who would have thought? Not me, that’s for sure.

Since it’s been two weeks since I started Week 4 of the Couch-to-5K (C25K) running plan, one might reasonably guess that I’ve just completed Week 5, but no, not so much. Week 4 went pretty well—I did the all the prescribed intervals plus some extra repeats to keep my total time per workout up around where it had been in the last week of my previous plan. The only glitch was twisting my ankle on the last Week 4 session. It hurt enough when I did it to bring tears to my eyes; I considered cutting my workout short, but since I was going to have to walk on it anyway to get back I figured I might as well try to keep going. I ended up getting through the whole session as planned but later in the day my ankle really stiffened up and I worried that I shouldn’t have pushed it. But it never got noticeably swollen and felt much better after a night’s rest so it worked out okay.

Still, I didn’t want to overstress it during the next workout, so I backed off from the schedule and did only a half hour total and made up the intervals as I went along. It was then that I discovered a problem with some of the songs on my nano. I’d made a playlist just for the C25K Week 4 intervals, changing the stop times of songs as needed per the tip here so I wouldn’t have to use my kitchen timer to track when to switch between walking and running (the timer works great when the intervals are in whole minute increments, but it’s a bit tedious to set things like 1:30 and 2:30). When I switched to a different playlist for this workout, I found some of the songs were cutting off before they should have. When I hooked up the nano and looked in iTunes, sure enough the stop times of those songs were changed on the non-C25K playlist as well. Lesson learned: the stop time goes with the song, not the playlist. I guess that makes sense, but it’s still annoying.

I could have gone back to the C25K program last night, but since I’d taken a week off hoping to get rid of this cold that’s been dogging me (no luck there) I thought just getting out there was enough of an accomplishment, so I again made up my own intervals. A couple of them turned out to be pretty long, around 7 minutes, so I felt good about that. I’m not sure what I’ll do for my next workout; it’s the last one before my 5K so I don’t want to go too crazy and tire myself out. Maybe I’ll do one more make it up as I go before getting back to the C25K.