Zen Labs C25K Couch to 5K Week 1 Day 1

Zen Labs C25K Free App

A friend of mine wants to do a 5k with me sometime this year. I'm not really sure why I agreed to this madness, but she asked me about it again yesterday. Today was supposed to be my rest day for Body Beast, but I was going to do my Sunday workout today so I could have Sunday as my rest day. Instead, I decided to load some music onto my iPod and hit the streets! I did Week 1 Day 1 of Zen Labs C25K Free App. The free version has ads at the bottom. I think it's $1.99 for the pro version. I'm not sure what you get in the pro version that you don't get in the free version, but I don't really care either. The free version does what I need it to do. You can learn more about the app on the Zen Labs website. There are a ton of different C25K apps. I'm not really sure why I picked this one, but it does what I want it to do so that's all that I care about really.

Okay, so the picture on the left says Week 1 Day 2 because I forgot to take a screen shot of the screen before I started, but the Week 1 Day 1 and Week 1 Day 2 workouts are the same. 

At the top of the screen, you can Week and Day that you are on. Just below that to the left is how long that day's workout will be. Some of them are slightly shorter and some are slightly longer. I think the shortest is 28 minutes and I think the longest is 40 minutes. 

To the right of that, you can see what you'll be doing for that day. The first week is a five minute warm up of brisk walking. Then you alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

 Below that you see three circles. The left circle is the time elapsed. The middle circle is the timer for the part that you are currently on and which interval you're on. The circle on the right is how much longer you have to go. 

Below that is the Start/Pause button. 

Below that you can scroll through the different days to see what else you've got coming. It checks off each day as you do it.

Below that you can play music from your iTunes library. I have an iPhone, so it's possible that the Android version pulls music from some other place. 

There's also a settings button. You can change the cues. The default is to have Voice, Beeps and Vibrate on. So the phone will beep once and vibrate, then the voice will tell you to start walking or start jogging. You also get a message at the halfway point letting you know you are halfway done with the workout. 

There's also a message board you can check out. I haven't done anything with it. 

The last thing on the bottom looks like it just shows ad. I'm not really sure though. 

Below those four options is an ad. I'm not sure what would show there if I had the pro version. 

Week 1 Day 1 didn't go exactly as planned in the app. I hit the button to make my screen lock so I could reduce the battery usage. I don't think that's a good idea. It felt like the first five minutes was taking more than five minutes. When I pulled the phone out to check it, it showed that I still had like a minute and a half left of walking so I kept walking. A few seconds later, it changed to show that I had 30 seconds of jogging left which meant I had missed 30 seconds of my first jogging interval. I decided to just keep walking and then pick up on the next jogging interval. I made up for the missed jogging interval during the first minute of the cool down. My cool down was longer than they had budgeted for me too because it took me longer to get back to my house. I didn't really have a plan of where I was going to walk. When I left the house, I headed towards the high school. That only took about 7 minutes. I decided to do the rest of the program on the high school track. I thought it might be better for my shins which at that point were starting to hurt already! I did't want to bail on my first day of C25K so I tried the track. It seemed to help. My shins didn't get worse while using the track. 

I went out in a t-shirt and sweatpants. It was a little bit too chilly for that. I should have had a long sleeve shirt or a light sweatshirt or something. I was pretty chilly even jogging. I brought my water bottle, but it was really annoying to carry. I'm going to get one of those special ones designed for runners. It's got a strap for your hand so you don't really have to grip it since it's stuck to you. They also have a pouch for my keys and stuff. That reminds me....I need to figure out what I did with my license. 

Okay so the first day was pretty rough. My breathing was bad. Running for 60 seconds is about as much as I can handle! I've only got two more days like this and then I'm supposed to run for 90 seconds! Eeek! I'm curious how this is going to go! It felt good, but my shins hurt and my calves hurt. My breathing was horrible and the coughing lasted most of the rest of the day.

After the workout is over, They give you the option to post it on Facebook, Twitter and something else, but I'm not sure what that is. It might be MyFitnessPal or something, but I'm not sure.  

BodyMedia Screen Shots

Okay so the first screen shot is the workout tab. Please note the 22 minutes of vigorous activity on the workout tab, but once I uploaded, the app showed No minutes of vigorous activity for the day. I'm not really sure what happened. According to the website, I never even hit 12 calories per minute! I've walked and gotten vigorous minutes. I ran today. It was rather slow, but it was running! I was breathing crazy heavy. I wanted to die! I got NO vigorous minutes! Now I'm starting to question the app and I want to go through the workout tab screen shots and compare them to the corresponding daily totals and see if I lost any other vigorous minutes.