Well, that was a good start.

It's 17:38 right now, and I'm done with the first day of my workout. I'll be posting these updates daily for the first week and weekly - for the rest of the 30 days. I did some running and started two challenges, both designed for 30 days: Burpee Challenge and Core Challenge.

I consider the 8 Weeks to 5K Challenge started, even though I discovered it post factum. I usually use my cellphone to measure times and lapses, but today I took my smartphone with me to make the promised selfie (here's the album, by the way - I did some more photographs while I was there). Said smartphone has glitchy battery life display: it stays on 15% until 5% (which I doubt, considering that it lost charge almost immediately after I started taking photographs), so I didn't know it was about to sleep. So I came to park, did the photoshoot... and it turned off.

All of this story's to say that I didn't measure the exact timing on the run I did, but from what I experienced, it comes close to what's in the 8 Week Challenge, so I consider the first day done as well as the others'.

I took the advice from Couch to 5K and took a five-minute walk before running, and it turned to help tremendously. Running felt a lot easier, because my legs weren't as stiff; I was able to run for longer, which made my lungs ache, but I felt like I could have ran for longer, which is a step forward. I'm going to continue taking walks around the part before running: it sounds like a good practice.

I started the day as planned, at 5:30, but it took long to reply to all the support and advice people gave me in the initial post, then I had to eat, take a cold shower to wake myself up and wait a bit before the food settled... Which is to say, I could have done it a lot earlier if I wanted to, which brings me to the next point:

I started lazily. It's true that I want to challenge myself and finally get some work done for my body, but it's also true that I'm a lazy person when it comes to physical work: I never had a chance to get used to or to adjust to it. I just finished the burpees and the core exercises, after an extensive amount of procrastinating. It's not to say that this is how things have to go for me - it's to say that I need more discipline in my work, be it writing or exercises.

The burpees and core challenges started off slowly, but the plank reaches proved to be very difficult. Maybe I could do a minute-long elbow plank (I did a plank challenge in the past), but to reach forward from that position is both new and straining for me right now. This difficulty is novel to me - other exercises seem boring because "meh, I can do... some... of them" - and, therefore, interesting. Let's see how I'm gonna climb this hill.

To track my progress, I've made a publicly available Google Spreadsheet. Feel free to take a look from time to time and scold me if I ever slack off or stop.

Well, it's 17:48 as of this moment. Have a good day, and stay healthy.