I recently started the Couch Potato to 5K workout. Again. I’ve tried it a few times before and always drop out just a few weeks in.

If you’re not familiar, C25K is an app that guides you through three workouts each week. During week one, after a five minute warm-up, you jog sixty seconds and walk 90 seconds, repeating through the next twenty minutes. A five minute cool down and you’re done!

You do this three times in a week and then the workout changes, becoming a bit harder with each passing week.

The problem with this workout is that in week five you leap from jogging eight minutes and walking three to jogging for twenty minutes straight. That is a huge leap and I can never do it. Instead, I fall prey to my own selective perfectionism which often rears its ugly head when I really want to quit anyway.

But I’m prepared this time. My plan is to repeat every week, focusing on incorporating incline and improving speed on the second go through. When I reach week five, I’ll stick for a while and keep building incline until I’m a bit more comfortable. When I do move on, stepping back the incline should make it easier to go further.

Since the time change, it’s getting dark earlier, making it harder to walk outdoors after work. That means I’ll have no excuse but to come home and jump on the treadmill with this workout.

I’ll let you know how it goes.