Starting to get Fit: Month 1

OK, after I’ve stopped doing kickboxing, I really didn’t do much training at all. Sure, I took excessively long walks (some way longer than 20k) which were good and fun, but it wasn’t really continuous.  And it took a long time to do such walks. And, my selection of wearable pants has grown smaller at an alarming rate…  Now, I don’t have any ambitions to get back to the weight of my “old” running days (with a BMI of less than 19) or the rigorous and time consuming training of kickboxing. I’m not really built for kickboxing, anyhow.
My basic assumptions are:
1)    I am lazy, so the training has to be efficient.
2)    While I love running, I can’t do it for too long distances due to knee problems.
3)    I want to be able to do it on my own time.
4)    Focus on general conditioning, not strength.

So, I decided to use pulse based training (to ensure efficiency) and to start of by using my old training bike. Yeah, I guess there are a lot of those around, unused, as was mine. I started out doing 15 minutes training three times a week. I also started to use my old Heart Rate Monitor (HRM) to keep myself in the right training zone (70 – 79 % of maximum heart rate to get the most endurance training, while keeping the impact low). And I took my resting heart rate, which is a great way to get a feel for your general level of fitness. Mine was around 66, which for me is staggeringly high. At peak fitness I had about 50, and it has been a long while since I had over 60. Over the next two weeks I raised the amount of training to 3×20 and then 3×25… I quickly realized that there were far cooler HRM’s available than my old one (even if it works quite fine, there is always the love of gizmos…) and I set my sights on the Polar T11, which supposedly had all these nifty fitness functions. After talking to a sales clerk at the local sport store, I realized that the more running oriented RS200 was far superior. After a bunch of trouble, I did end up with the better model, RS400SD with a foot pod, IR-interface and all kinds of nifty stuff. And, yeah, I love it. A tad to big to wear as a normal watch, but looks great.  After spending a while reading up on the watch, and there is plenty to learn, I designed my own training program. The goal is to do four sets of training each week, with an added swimming session at times, but never more than five sessions a week. One session is interval training, and if the weather permits, there is one running session each week. This will be increased to two sessions a week in the future, if the knees permit it.
After the first month of training, my resting heart rate seems to have dropped a bit, so I am at around 63. I do love the training, being in the third zone (70 – 80 %) means that the sessions are hard, but not too hard. Interval sessions are really hard, however, but that is just once a week.
All in all, I feel good! Have been looking at some small triathlons, it would be cool to do an Olympic distance triathlon in the future… You got to have goals!

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