Exercise: Trying something new

One of the leading recommendations for cancer prevention is thirty minutes of exercise daily.  Two weeks after my mastectomy when I was cleared for exercise, I developed a plan.  I was going to start exercising thirty minutes a day three days a week, of course blog all about the different types of exercises I was doing, and work up to exercising daily.  From the lack of blogging on this issue, you can already guess how this has turned out.

The first day I decided I was going to do calisthenics that focused on the lower body with names like "the big booty buster."  I was lunging and kicking and squatting and jumping (and gasping and sweating and grunting) for thirty minutes.

And then I was so sore I could barely walk for the next three days, thus ending my "new exercise regimen."

Two months later my dad was visiting and told me all about the 5k training program he and my stepmother are doing.  I have kind of tried to get into running before (if jogging once and feeling like I was dying after .2 miles counts) and just decided running wasn't for me.

But my dad said that most people can't just step outside their door and start running.  The 5k training program he is doing is similar to the Couch to 5k program.  I'll go into more detail below, but the bottom line is you do intervals of jogging and walking, starting off with short intervals jogging followed by several minutes of walking and building up to longer intervals of jogging than walking.  When we did the 5k, we could easily spot the runners who were doing set intervals of jogging and running.  They didn't look particularly peaked, and suddenly running didn't seem so impossible.

And there's always an app for that - my dad showed me a running app that tracks your distance, time, calories burned, average pace, and more.

The next weekend my husband and I started our own 5k training program.  We started out jogging for one minute, then walking for three minutes...and learned the hard way that you really should stretch and do a warm-up walk.  Two weeks later we started jogging for one minute, then walking for two minutes.  And two weeks later we are jogging for two minutes and walking for two minutes.

Look at us go!
Original source

And you know what?  It has been awesome!  Here's why I love running, or whatever it is we're doing:

• it's something new to concentrate on, instead of cancer.
• it's one-on-one time with my husband without any interruptions, except for those pesky jogging intervals.
• it's something new for us to do together.
• I feel in charge of my body again.
• I have more self-confidence. 
• I feel less anxious.  I didn't realize this until we went 11 days without training.
• there's an instant reward of having run faster, or longer, or farther (just 1 of the 3 at this point)
• being outside is just good for the soul.

Plus, a new study just came out proving why exercise prevents breast cancer.  When the study first came out two months ago, I thought it was about lowering the risk for estrogen-positive breast cancer, but now I can't find where I read that.  So, if you're Her2/neu positive like me (...yay...) then we're still protected!

I still have designs of exercising every day, and maybe one day I'll do 3 reps of 10 sets of "big booty busters" but for now: