5 is a magical number!

You may have noticed in my last couple of posts that I have been getting really close to reaching 5 miles during my hour on the elliptical. I am here to tell you that I have succeeded!!! I raised my resistance up to 8 today, and I started out going as fast as I could. I noticed that I was at a pace of about a 12:00 mile. I decided to push through as hard as I could and maintain that pace for the whole hour, so that I could reach 5 miles. And as you can see from the picture posted below, I actually reached 5.06 miles in one hour. I was so proud of myself, that I almost teared up. 5 miles has just always seemed like such an unobtainable number, but not anymore. I did a post a couple of weeks back about allowing yourself to be proud of your accomplishments, and I am definitely proud of this one. A 12:00 minute mile might seem so easy for some people, but keeping my pace at a 12:00 mile has been really hard for me. I am excited to see how much farther I will be able to go in the future.

 I plan to start adding some light strength training this week by adding some push ups and low weight dumbbells to my workouts. I want to start toning as I am losing weight, so that as I get smaller I will also start to see some definition in my arms and legs. I also attempted a very small amount of running on Sunday, to see how my knees would do. Brandon and I were walking in the park, and I ran up ahead a couple of times to test my knees out. I did not have any problems that day or yesterday. Today I felt a little twinge of pain when I was squatting down to get something, but it was very minor. Since I don't have a scheduled workout on Sundays I am going to start using that day for running. The doctor told me to try one day a week at first, so I am going to try this for a few weeks and see how my knees hold up. I think that as I get stronger and lose more weight that I will be able to run more and more. Here's hoping!

Thans for reading,
Sarah