During my time at the gym most lunch hours on the cross trainer, I kept eyeing off the treadmills. I’ve been apprehensive about stepping on the treadmills as historically I’ve had a shin muscle issue with walking fast or jogging that’d cause my shin muscles to become completely fatigued, to the point where I can’t even lift my toes to walk heal first.

A little while ago I decided that I’d give the treadmill a go and to my surprise my shins appeared to be fine. A few more attempts at different intensity levels and they still seemed to be okay. I haven’t done anything to specifically address that issue, however since I’ve lost the better part of 10kg now – I wonder if that wasn’t contributing to the problem all along.

After feeling confident that my shin muscles weren’t going to immediately pack it in, I thought I’d go for a short jog and see how everything held together. I started off with a whopping 1km, a tiny distance by virtually anyone’s measure but nothing was hurting. I did that a couple times over the next week and still no pain. Instead of increasing the speed or incline on the treadmill, I left it flat, increased the distance to 2km & still didn’t have any pain after doing it a couple of times.

Between the second week of June and the end of the month, I jogged ten times across the month during my work lunch hours ranging in distance from 3km to 6km. Each time I go for a jog, I try to increase something, whether it was total time jogging, increasing speed, even if it was just for a particular interval. Given I’m at such an early stage of fitness with my running, I don’t think it matters too much what is increasing, just so long as something is improving or not going backwards.

My next goal is going to be a 7km run at lunch.